Entering the sea and leaving blue is the title of the exhibition, which prepares us for a kind of color bath. The bathroom will not be marine, but pictorial. The Joan Prats gallery exhibits a selection of paintings by Alfons Borrell (Barcelona, 1931-Sabadell, 2020), until March 22. The last time I had the opportunity to talk to him was in the fall of 2019, at a lunch attended by cultural journalists and in which Borrell carried out a memorable exercise in anti-marketing and modesty.
On that occasion, the painter declared that “in reality, painting is easy”. And, to complete this striking statement, he added that he only used six colors, and also just as they come out of the acrylic tube, and that the only thing he mixed was black and white, to achieve the grays... And it was not a provocation. I think Borrell is the least pretentious artist and comedian I've ever met. There must be few like him, in a guild where inflated egos, pedestal poses, and pedantic airs poorly disguised with false modesty abound.
Alfons Borrell was a colorful and yet austere Franciscan painter. He limited the expressive elements and even the number of colors chosen, but his horizon was open. He did not represent anything, but he composed and presented: abstract presences or absences, material appearances where the ego disappeared. His paintings were like almost empty stages, in the prelude phase of something indefinite, populated by the minimum elements sufficient to express certain notions. For example, the game of limits and overflows, or the paradox of affirming, through silence, something indefinite, like visual music.
