Albert Ràfols Casamada

ALBERT RÀFOLS CASAMADA (Barcelona, 1923 - 2009).
Untitled.
Oil on canvas.
Attached payment receipt signed by the artist, May 1968.
Measurements: 43 x 34 cm.

The abstract language gave Ràfols Casamada considerable creative freedom to experiment with textures, shapes, gesture and color, prioritizing at all times compositional simplicity and conceptual richness. In this composition, the space is divided into three zones: on the right side we can appreciate the faint drawing of a cup on a plate that seems to be chiseled with a gouge on wood, and on the left side a wedge imprints dynamism to the geometry. The central white band separates both realities. Ràfols gives the viewer the responsibility of deciphering the messages, based on the emotions that the plastic experimentation awakens in him.

Painter, educator, writer and graphic artist, Ràfols Casamada enjoys great international prestige. He began 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 will elaborate a poetic abstraction, amorphous in its configuration, free and intelligent, the result of a slow gestation and based on environments, themes, objects or graphics of everyday life. Ràfols Casamada works with these fragments of reality, of life, in a process of disfigurement, playing with the connotations, the 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 scholarship to travel to France, and settled in Paris until 1954. There he became acquainted with post-cubist figurative painting, as well as the work of Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Miró, among others. These influences were joined in his painting to 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 characterized 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 color 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 Premio de las Artes de la CEOE 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 National Art Museum of Catalonia. His work can be found in the most important museums around the world: the Reina Sofia 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 the Tate Gallery in London, among many others.