José Luis Pascual Samaranch

JOSÉ LUIS PASCUAL SAMARANCH (Barcelona, 1947).
"The million", 1983.
Acrylic on glass.
Signed and dated.
Measurements: 63 x 60 cm; 68 x 65 cm (frame).
Painter, sculptor and engraver, José Luis Pascual studied Architecture at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Barcelona, where he graduated in 1970. Since the beginning of his career he has produced and edited several books, of which "Monografía destructiva sobre la comunicación gráfica" (1975) is the first. Since then he has produced other books and folders of lithographs and engravings, presented in such outstanding galleries as René Métras and Gaspar (Barcelona), or Sen (Madrid), in Biennials such as the International of São Paulo (1981) and Venice, and in other centers such as the Arnau Theater in Barcelona (1986). He has also ventured into the disciplines of video art, sculpture and poster art, as well as creating several trencadís murals. Pascual has exhibited his work in Spain, Italy, Brazil, Belgium, Switzerland, France, the United States and Andorra, and develops a multidisciplinary figurative language, based on the play of silhouettes and planes. His work evolves, starting in the seventies, from an expressionism limited to black and white to a language close to pop at the end of that decade, integrating color and comic elements. In the mid-eighties he began his stage of wrought iron sculptures that describe profiles or silhouettes, as if it were the shadow of a figure, within a poetics that seeks to emphasize a kind of immateriality or lightness of the concept summarized in planes, with the almost total absence of volumes. Translated this repertoire to painting, it acquires since the late eighties certain neo-expressionist dyes, sometimes approaching abstraction, especially through the formal resource of his zigzagging lines and the rhythmic decomposition of those drawing profiles of his sculpture.