Carme Riera - website of the artist CRESPI I ALEMANY

Words to accompany the paintings and sculpture by Guillem Crespí
Carme Riera
Guillem Crespí i Alemany asked me to say a few words to go along with his exhibit. Although his work does not need any
type of presentation, much less any warranty since the work itself is significant and widely recognized, as an admirer of
this Majorcan painter and sculptor it gives me great pleasure to accede to his request,.
For a long time, especially near the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, a number of national and
international painters visited Mallorca, attracted especially by the island light, which they attempted to imbue in their
paintings. This interest in capturing the light is, to my understanding, the key element that joins, for example, the group
of painters that settled in Pollensa - Anglada Camarasa, Cittadini, Bernaregi- or those who visited such places and
melded it into their canvases, such as Rusiñol or Mir. Perhaps one of the essential secrets of beauty is indeed the light
that emanates forth, a light that Guillem Crespí knows also and so well how to capture.
Crespí is from Santa Margalida, which means the Plaza of Mallorca; the town – not those domains of its city that
belong to the zoning disasters of Can Picafort and Son Serra de Marina. His town has not suffered the onslaughts of
tourists that have polluted so many others and infringed upon the serene lives of their inhabitants which, even though
sufficiently bound to jobs and days, plays in favour of the works of our artist. He keeps his studio in Santa Margalida,
where he is free to work without noise or interruptions, waiting only to convert into paint and sculpture his interpretation
of the world.
If someone were to ask me what elements are fundamental in this interpretation, I would say that, within the environment
that offers him the fruits of the Earth that surrounds him, remember that in his path, music plays a most
extraordinary role. How can painting and sculpture interpret music? Crespí resolves his painting concerto by offering
us the instruments from whence it comes. He uses his forms for the purpose of evoking sounds that allow us to enjoy
the reading of certain determined pentagrams.
The interrelation between the different arts has long worried and preoccupied artists, especially the symbolists who
have even tried to organize scent concerts. I believe that the pictorial and sculptural will of Guillermo Crespí is not far
from seeking correspondence between the various arts, and these congruencies catch our senses synaesthesically, since
from his painting and sculpture comes music that we feel with the eyes, while we contemplate his work.
In Crespí’s palette of tones there is a preference for the colours from nature: ochres, the brown of Earth, the greys of the
winter skies serve as a backdrop for the object that becomes the subject of the painting that we could at times consider
a still life if we understood as such the painting of objects of such a long tradition in western art. Still lifes often have
a symbolic sense - already present in what we may consider as forebears, referring to those found in the tombs of ancient
Egyptians - which intensified starting from the middle ages with the presence of some element, whether a skull
or a revolting little animal such as a rat, a fly or a scarab, such as we can see, for example, in the painting of Flegel (a
painter who excites me) where between the flowers, fruits or delicious foods he introduced a disquieting, negative or
contaminating element. It warns us that everything is ephemeral and will end and, consequently, our very existence is
threatened, just as would later stand out the Vanitas that appear in Baroque painting. To a certain extent it comes to
mean the same as the classic Latin sentence: Latet anguis in herba; “The snake in the grass”.
Starting from the 18th century, the still lifes that continued to be painted began to lose their symbolic or even allegorical
connotations of the Baroque period, and were used by painters to emphasize objects that attract, while at the same
time experimenting with technique, constructing and deconstructing. I am thinking now about Picasso, Braque or Gris,
who also used musical instruments, the same as Guillem Crespí.
The playing with background, the mixed techniques, the lines that suggest the contours of instruments, which sometimes
seem to float in a magical atmosphere, are most personal aspects that place the still lifes of Guillem Crespí in the
history of the contemporary art.