"Vivers" Rafel Joan at the Sala Parés

At first you believe that a filtered brightness assails you, something like desire. A dull incandescence, half in darkness, that takes root in the eclipse and thickens, which you must glimpse, just as you search in the weight of the air for the wing of a nocturnal animal crossing the sky. And it's not hard to know that there is always a cliff between this radiance and ourselves. Between two darknesses. Because to the euphoric plenitude of what is alive is added that orphanhood of going one's own way, a solitude for those who walk apart. Yet it is as if swimming in this clarity were a kind of difficult innocence that is created only by the backlight of always being far, underwater or in the densest jungle of being here, and which softens in the distance. As if the annoyance that prevents you from seeing clearly were not a moot that clouds your gaze, but rather a calm virulence that gives you pleasure. Like a nervous fluidity, a nakedness of the eyes. Something with the texture of a secret, trembling in the quiet wonder of repose without ceasing to be convulsed and thrilling. A geopoetics that seeks to make one feel the effects of the interaction with light, and which brings forth a landscape-thinking. A way of reading space, the unraveled of the unlimited that gnaws at our soul. Thus, like when you dive into the calm sea of a summer morning or the grass hides you, and you swim in that moiré, the lush green of shimmering waters, and the speckled glimmer that travels in the arabesque of foliage. And you are in the hermit-like silence of when something is left hanging in the air.

What are you doing here, with this pity that the weeds make you feel? What are you seeking in the humility of staying underwater? What makes you think that in a barren light, in the fruitless radiance of iridescent glimmers, you will find the atmosphere of an imminence, because in the glimmer you guess the clues, and you discern the fertility of knowing how to undress yourself in uncertainty, in the ease of being simple. As if you were at the beginning, in the notes of a prelude. Where you still feel the attraction to what is yet to be born. You, and this murmur of being far away. And the unconditional freedom of a poetics of overflow, yet without ceasing to touch the strangeness of the surrounding world, among iridescences and meshes, and a sensation of ointments, a sense of adherence that recalls the force of attraction that crosses the cosmos, as if it were possible to feel on the skin the friction of something that is always at the beginning, a bud being born, the tenderest tip of a sprout, or as if you had to lose yourself in the exuberant chromatics of the submarine spectacle, where a dark force that binds everything seems more evident and expands. There is something, you do not quite know what, of reconciliation in this way of telling the world, among the lupine shadows of dark and light patches, now in the oceanic evocation that returns with one who walks underwater. It speaks of the wonder of the world and dispossession, the discord between man and nature, altogether, of one who seeks to show what is there from the heart of the earth. Like a siren song. Things that must be clarified in the depths. A stir of kindness, intuitive perspicacity, a jumble of desire and memory, but without ceasing to embody a persistent threat, ambushed and furtive. As if looking, here, were a form of ablution. You do not know how, and you are facing an abyssal firmament. And in a Carthusian silence it were possible to hear the voice of the water. Or that liquid euphoria that provokes the temptation of mirage. A quiet stupor, which only the entranced find in the languid enchantment of the shivering foliage, in the calm, kaleidoscopic confusion of the opulent undergrowth, of the lushness that gnaws at your eyes, dirty and hidden by the desire to find you-do-not-know-what of the oracular and obscure. Which speaks truth, and at the same time is a veil, and never quite stops resonating in the happy and shrill confusion that buzzes in this poetics of the evasive. And which makes us blink at the idea of learning to look anew. In a kind of mysticism, but far from any form of transcendentalism.

It's when you think you know that gazing is paying attention and that seeing is also dodging the excess of foresight that hides from us the world's incandescence. For it is not what impresses the eye or makes things visible that we come to glimpse here, but rather the ecstasy that brings us to the drunkenness of vision, that lets us fall into that darkness of dazzling which brings to light the book of marvels. For a moment you come to think that the painter rubs his eyes, in bucolic unrest, but does not intend to distract himself or make you gape. In the aquarium of the underwater world or in the arborescence of vegetal life, he finds a way to unfold, to be free, to find in the free fragrances he suggests and the sensory experiences he proposes a furtive sensuality and a place to hide from the brutality and merciless harshness that devours the moment in which we are. A place to think. Because it places us before the full and plenitudinous presence of things. Stretched out on the cool grass or plunged in with the urge to dive to the bottom while it drowns you like an unusual nostalgia to return to the sea and breathe through gills. This is how the desire returns to braid itself with the inexhaustible and incessant forms of what is real. And that longing to go all the way there, to the skylight of beginnings, yes, to the sea, and the taste of primordial times that the grass always releases. For all this brightness that reverberates is the force and obstinacy of the marvel that allows us to underpin everyday life. That is why the painting of Rafel Joan is a solar song, it comes from a pagan wisdom, the bursting forth of what is alive. Each brushstroke is a clear gesture, against rigidity, that is shed from the weight of shadow and reveals the vivifying fluidity, the lubricity of the mistletoe, the eroticism of sticky matter, which does not pose as an epic of rupture, but of hesitation, from that strange trembling with which nature responds, from the chiaroscuro of life. And with an euphoric, joyous, expansive and vibrant palette. To paint germination, the mute and secret forces of the bud, this way the foliage stirs, vegetal choreography and plasticity, the refraction of light as it passes through and agitates the water in this silence of seaweed, covered with sand. And with the certainty of knowing that seeing is a dynamic process of permanent transformation, with the desire to devour the uncontainable and indomitable vitality that never stabilizes, neither in an identity nor aspires to fixity. And to discover in this humble jungle of weeds that draws no horizons, in the muteness of diving helmet and frazzled seaweed, the difficult tension between instant and duration, able to undo our eyes. In a true ecology of forms. Something that in its Dionysian way braids itself with an Apollonian tranquility that flickers between fragment and totality, between the baroque and the austere classicism, as if painting were only metabolizing light. And rushing into an intoxication of the bottom of an incalculable sea. Or feeling that trembling of leaves in the air that stirs the brightness and so aptly expresses our fragility. It is then that Rafel Joan's painting shows a light that trembles, bare, naked, vulnerable, but which flings open in all its vitalist amplitude, when this garden is all seedbed, and then of open souls, when the submerged paintings are authentic nurseries of passions, a hedonist visual epic, of so much life that overflows. And we can sense if painting is not like putting down patches, like the shadow cast by a tree with very light branches, or the green marble improvised by the waves and seen by the underwater eye. And letting the sun touch it. A convulsive passion of nerves. Spasms of light on the skin of the world.

Sebastià Perelló

Free admission, Tuesday to Saturday from 11 am to 2 pm and 4 pm to 8 pm.