CRESPI I ALEMANY
Baltasar Porcel
By Baltasar Porcel
Mallorca is where it is no longer. What I mean is as a well-known international poster: the real Mallorca, its features hewn out of deep roots, can only be found inland, in the nooks and crannies of mountains, on sunlit plains, in pieces of furniture, in market gardens, in the "profound silence", both real and metaphorical, of Miquel dels Sants Oliver. In a dwelling built with the touch of strong hands, controlled by a historical outlook on things, on the ups and downs of life.
The foreigner who comes on holiday usually thinks he has been in Mallorca, but what he or she has really visited is a publicity poster with beaches, hotels and shops, roads overcrowded with cars, dreadful all-pervading noise. So if, instead, he wants to get to know the island, where the visitor should really go is inland. Or, metaphorically speaking, to the paintings of Guillem Àngel Crespí i Alemany. Crespí i Alemany is from Santa Margalida, an ancient village nestling between fields of stubble and a sea of waves, the bay of Alcudia, the Conquest, toil and fear. No doubt this is where Crespí i Alemany finds the colour that, so clearly, so purely, so consistently, illuminates his art, creating an atmosphere in which the streamlined hues of Matisse and the well-rounded brushstrokes of Soutine may coincide, but where the radiant, energetic chromatism of Crespí i Alemany himself, the seal of his originality, abounds.
The artist transfers to canvas the material results of his observation, his motivation, his feelings: lush cabbages and the contours of a table, bunches of cherries and the angles of a chair, exuberant pumpkins and the armrests of a rocking-chair, bitter lemons and silent plates, the thick braid of a string of tomatoes and the deep circumference of a copper cooking-pot.
In other words, neither history nor entertainment, paintings devoid of anecdotes beyond the painting itself but, nevertheless, imbued with being: volume created from touch and sensation, its own laws of existence, matter for matter's sake. "I am who I am" as Jehovah proclaimed in the Old Testament.
Hands that have planted watermelons in muddy soil, that have sawed and nailed together pieces of wood, mould these temporary objects through painting into an essential portrayal that persists in nature. Hands, of course, in the sense of the enormous creative talent of Guillem Àngel Crespí i Alemany, whose meticulous and bountiful experiments are based on his knowledge and command of immediacy. Nothing is gratuitous in these paintings; everything is consistent. Crespí i Alemany uses industrial dyes and natural pigments, paper pulp and acrylic resin, casein and watercolour. He makes it all himself or at least manipulates it: for him, colour is not conventional but individual, each band of colour in the rainbow not an adornment but a personalisation.
His pictures are both detached from and integrated into a background that may consist of delicate shades of grey, as subtle as smoke, dominated by the splendid outline of a cabbage with a shape of its own, where blues or reds absent in nature take on a new naturalness in the work of art, a forthright expressiveness.
Drawings which, in reality, form a linear theorem of harmonies are almost an excuse for displaying chromatic quality or material mass. The back of a chair or the curves of a rocking-chair are highlighted in a geometric dance, with motionless grace. And the rough texture of shredded paper becomes gritty organic matter, felicitous condensation.
Mallorcan painting of recent years can hold its own on the international art scene, being created by artists who know their craft and follow their intuition: no better combination than this to achieve originality. But it is one thing to follow in the footsteps of the series of conventional trendsetters to be found everywhere and quite another to drink from the fundamental source of creation. So, for the record, we have two groups of artists, and Guillem Àngel Crespí i Alemany belongs to the second, the group that is at the forefront and will remain at the forefront.
Barcelona, 2002
Translation by Cathy Sweeney
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