"The Pyrenees: landscape beyond, painting within". Muma at the Sala Parés

When we were children, the whole family would go to the Pyrenees for more than a week, around Sant Joan, to the Vall de Boí: tent, sleeping bag, and lots of hikes. It was the years 1966-69, there was hardly anyone there and in Taüll you still got there by a cart track. Later, between the ages of 18 and 20, I did a lot of ski mountaineering and took part with the CEC in organizing the Ralli CAI CAF (1976) as a volunteer, equipping the Renclusa and other tasks.

Now, as a visual artist, I have been working on the mountain territory for more than 12 years, first in the Alps and then in the Pyrenees. I do not paint the high mountains, but rather the inhabited mountains, colonized by humans. What has interested me about the Pyrenees are the pastures and pastoralism, the mountain passes, the routes of refugees and smuggling; also the mines and forges (18th and 19th centuries), mountaineering and the refuges, up to leisure and all the snow sports. For the past four years, I have made a ten-day trip to the Pyrenees each year to draw and scout locations. Also lots of reading. Clearly, the peaks provide an invaluable backdrop.

Accompanying me have been Verdaguer, with his journey on foot, from Canigó to the Maladetas, and Ramond de Carbonnières with his foundational book about the Pyrenees from almost 240 years ago. And many others.

For me, painting allows me to capture a holistic vision of this territory with all elements of life: economy (agriculture, livestock, iron, charcoal, wood, commerce, tourism, spas), social organization (commons, transhumance, mills, sawmills, transport, raftsmen), culture (language, place names, music, literature), traditions (torch festivals, markets, dances, rituals), leisure (mountaineering, skiing), movement (trails, mountain passes, border paths), energy (water as mechanical energy, electricity) and architecture as a witness to time (styles, types of construction, street furniture).

Painting the Pyrenees (and the vanishing snow) is to confront complexity, to face the fragility that precedes change and at the same time to equip oneself with tools to reinvent the territory and to imagine the future.

Muma

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