Barcelona Metropolis

The Vila Casas Foundation brings together the entire oeuvre of Vicenç Viaplana for the first time in the exhibition Vicenç Viaplana. The Places of Painting. This retrospective affords us an insight into a painstaking process spanning a forty-year career that takes the pictorial practice as a search in itself that does not end on the surface of the painting but extends beyond it.

In recent years, I have rarely come across exhibitions that transport me as clearly as the exhibition Vicenç Viaplana. The Places of Painting. For those of us emerging from the Fine Arts studios of the early 1990s, the first works we come across in the exhibition may echo and challenge us to return to the studio, to the subject and to a time when some of us were quite disoriented. A time when it seemed that painting had little more to say, when many of us also felt engulfed by the knots of a closed system of art, laden with egos and empty rhetoric.

I remember how, before the disorientation we experienced in the university’s painting workshops, we took two fundamental resources to make sense of what we did: rhetoric (knowing how to argue was very important) and the character (the range of aesthetic and/or performative resources that added value to the work). I also remember how back then, before what it meant to face the complexity of pictorial language, many of us opted for other languages, such as video or performance, which allowed us to escape that loneliness and uncertainty that seemed to go hand in hand with painting. But Vicenç Viaplana remained resolutely committed; and now, in this exhibition, he clearly shows us how, tackling what many of us did not feel able to face, he has been able to turn it all around and transform a purported end of painting into a place.

Neither reference points nor certainties

In a chronologically ordered circuit in seven areas, the artist gradually leads us to an atmospheric space, a space with no clear reference points or certainties. A space where reality is blurred and where the small and the big, the tiny and the immense, the inside and the outside merge. A place where the medium is tangible and where the painting no longer reflects or specifies, but rather opens up to portray a state in an apparent non-place. This state conveyed by the artist in his works reminds me of those moments when, letting go of sight, blurring your vision, you stop and, without thinking about anything, in an apparent fuzzy fixed gaze, you are outside the space and the time for a few moments.

In Viaplana’s paintings you can feel recognition being relinquished and a space of widespread calm opening up that leads to an extension of the gaze. Thus, it is no longer with the appearance of things but with a deep structure that the artist speaks with time and space. And I therefore understand when he claims that the third dimension found in the paintings is lost in the photographed painting. Because a direct relationship with the painting is necessary in order to create a lively dialogue, an encounter that makes the silent and subtle communication of the subject possible.