NAUFRAGIOS Y TORMENTAS

Luis Claramunt (Barcelona, 1951), self-taught and associated with the Spanish Figuration movement of the 1980s, lives and works between Seville, Marrakech and Madrid. His origins are rooted in pointillism, and from the outset he has been interested in urban themes from an expressionist perspective; he paints enclaves and the people of the aforementioned cities, as well as Barcelona and Mallorca. Later, we witness a more stripped-down expressionism in which popular imagery abounds, with bullfighting themes standing out.

For several years now, his main source of imagery has been nature: his series on trees, and now his series on shipwrecks and storms of sand and ice. Deserts of different kinds in which orientation is impossible and in which the traveller is battered by the elements. The boat lost among the waves is not only a visually magnetic image but, like Rimbaud’s “drunken boat,” it symbolises the artist’s risky journey adrift, far from the harbour of certainties. With shipwrecks and storms, this figuration of apocalyptic images dissolves into a chromatic gesture.

“Naufragios y Tormentas is an explicitly conceived body of work that leaves no room for alternative interpretations. The work of this Barcelona-born artist revolves, in its concept, uniquely and exclusively around the theme of storms and shipwrecks, thereby focusing all possible reflection. In this way, the viewer approaches a painting of marked expressionist character, whose strength lies in the structuring of chromatic masses, in the violence of gesture, in its internal movement, and in the importance of composition. But the viewer does so with a knowledge that is not entirely untouched, already guided by the artist, who compels them to enter a world of agitated nature, strongly shaken by the virulence of the subject to which it belongs. A theme with a dramatic component and a precise resolution that unfolds within the narrow interval inherent to all thematic commitment.”

Carlota de Alfonso (1999)