Albert Ràfols Casamada

ALBERT RÀFOLS CASAMADA (Barcelona, 1923 - 2009).
Untitled, 1996.
Watercolour, charcoal and pencil on card.
Signed and dated in the lower left corner.
Provenance: Private collection.
Size: 45 x 34,5 cm.
After a brief figurative period, the 50's gave way to a more schematic and structured conception of reality, with a clearly abstractionist bias, which he would cultivate throughout the rest of his life. During the 1990s until the end of his career, his production is interpreted as a study of his own work. His compositions, stable and calm, show a structural purity taken to the extreme in which symmetry, order and balance configure the use of space dominated by geometry and the complementarity of colours.
A painter, teacher, writer and graphic artist, Ràfols Casamada enjoys great international prestige today. He started out in the world of drawing and painting with his father, Albert Ràfols Cullerés. In 1942 he began studying architecture, although he soon abandoned it to devote himself to the plastic arts. His father's post-impressionist influence and his particular cézannism mark the works presented in his first exhibition, held in 1946 at the Pictòria galleries in Barcelona, where he exhibited with the group Els Vuit. Subsequently, he gradually developed a poetic abstraction, amorphous in its configuration, free and intelligent, the fruit of a slow gestation and based on atmospheres, themes, objects or graphics from everyday life. Ràfols Casamada worked with these fragments of reality, of life, in a process of disfigurement, playing with connotations, plastic values and the visual richness of the possible different readings, in an attempt to fix the transience of reality. In 1950 he obtained a grant to travel to France, and settled in Paris until 1954. There he became acquainted with post-Cubist figurative painting, as well as with the work of Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Miró, among others. These influences were combined in his painting with that of American abstract expressionism, which was developing at the same time. When he finally returned to Barcelona he embarked on his own artistic path, with a style characterised by compositional elegance, based on orthogonal structures combined with an emotive and luminous chromaticism. After showing an interesting relationship, in the sixties and seventies, with neo-Dada and new realism, his work has focused on purely pictorial values: fields of colour in expressive harmony on which gestural charcoal lines stand out. He has received many awards, such as the National Plastic Arts Award from the Ministry of Culture in 1980, the Creu de Sant Jordi in 1982 and the CEOE Prize for the Arts in 1991. In 1985 he was named Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters of France, and is an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. In 2003 the Generalitat awarded him the National Visual Arts Prize of Catalonia, and in 2009, just two months before his death, Grup 62 paid tribute to him at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. His work can be found in the most important museums around the world: the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Guggenheim and MOMA in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles, the Picasso Museum in France, the Georges Pompidou in Paris and the British Museum and Tate Gallery in London, among many others.