Lluís Lleó

LLUÍS LLEÓ (Barcelona, 1961).
Untitled.
Mixed media on plexiglass.
Size: 140 x 136 x 6 cm.
Lluís Lleó has developed an innovative language by venturing into a borderline territory between painting and sculpture, this piece being a singular example of this mixture. Interested in textures and reliefs, he takes up in a contemporary key aspects of traditional techniques linked to fresco painting, such as the use of pigment in its pure state and Romanesque gilding. He inherited from his grandfather and father the fascination for the Romanesque paintings of the Vall de Boí. His spatial reliefs result in a kind of pictorial organicism in which the material emerges from the support and transmits dichotomies such as lyricism-contundity, presence-transparency and order-chaos.
Lluís Lleó currently lives and works between the intensely cosmopolitan city of New York and the small village of Rupiá, in Baix Empordà. His work, eminently abstract in character, has important links with European conceptualism and informalism, as can be seen in the piece we now present, where the title, the written word, is an integral part of the work, which is characterised, moreover, by its gestural, material nature and its chromatic restraint. Lluís Lleó began his exhibition career in 1988, and has taken part in numerous solo and group exhibitions of international scope. He has also participated in some of the most important art fairs on the international scene. His work is held in museums and collections such as the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, the Perez Art Museum Miami, the collection of the Fundació La Caixa, the Fank Collection for International Settlements in Basel, the Maison Particuliere in Brussels, the World Trade Center in Barcelona, the Fundació Godia in Barcelona and the Nagoya Art Museum in Japan.