"Liber Naturae" Carlos Forns at Sala Parés

Almost twenty years after his last exhibition in Barcelona, Carlos Forns returns to the City and presents his first solo exhibition at Sala Parés. LIBER NATURAE occupies spaces 1 and 3 of the gallery, showcasing the works of the artist's recent years, combining paintings and sculptures with a selection of objects, books, curiosities, and 'speaking curiosities' that make up his own collection. All of them are a source of inspiration and the basis in the construction of Forns' Liber Naturae, for whom pictorial activity constitutes a scientific expedition and an initiatory journey.

Through his painting, Carlos Forns reflects on the concept of constant flow. The universe is a great system of continuous change, where its parts and the beings that inhabit it transform and interconnect in a perpetual dance. No form is permanent, but rather in infinite metamorphosis.

Forns moves between deep reflection and the game of combining elements, specimens, or objects from his collection, found in travels or during investigations in the garden of the world. He magnifies them, combines them establishing unthinkable dialogues, transforms them, and metamorphoses them with his gaze of enthusiastic explorer. It is as if Forns compressed all his references and ideas into a giant chrysalis from which, after the eclosion and as if it were a magician's hat, thousands of images emerge behind the gap. From all of them, he establishes networks and connections that are arranged on the canvas, generating microcosms that act as a link with the mysteries of creation and life; something like expressions of the universe in miniature that also stand as images of the inner soul - of the creator and of those who admire them.

In his compositions, the changing nature of many structures projects imaginary geometries inspired by the hermetic diagrams of Giordano Bruno or the minimalist geometric images of Nicholas of Cusa. All these appearances allow the privilege of meditative contemplation. He understands them as magical talismans from which metaphors are constructed and the transfiguration of nature. As he himself points out, "it is about internalizing the universe in order to become magicians, demiurges capable of creating together with nature".