Jose Bonell (Barcelona, ​​1989) is a painter of stories that we cannot tell. To attack his paintings, beyond thinking in images, he resorts to sensations –fears, mysteries, anguish– and sharpens them to later give them the form of objects and scenarios where stories take place. These stories, however, cannot be narrated, only intuited. As spectators we recognize spaces that are everyday to us, although something does not fit us: we sense a trap; we are in tension because the window that opens before us is insufficient, too small, and we cannot guess the outcome. We imagine people who fluctuate outside the margins of the canvas, like a secret organization, but what are you doing that we don't see you? From time to time, an arm or legs come into our angle of vision, but they are not enough to tell us the whole story and we are forced to go back to the beginning, to retrace the path and impact again against those sensations – fear, mysteries. , anguish– prior to the images.

In the exhibition we find different scenes: the entrance of a house with a large fountain from which blood flows, a lit lantern in a dark room or a large banquet without diners. Are you all outside the box boundaries about to enter the scene or will you never get there? Artists like Gertrude Abercrombie, Henni Alftan or Guillermo Kuitca, like Bonell, share a taste for ambiguous scenarios full of unknowns. Also the artist Amèlia Riera (Barcelona, ​​1928–2019) did not tire of setting tables in her paintings, and the guests, who did not arrive. As a small tribute that serves to explore the paths in common between Riera and Bonell, the exhibition begins with the Tríptic del demà (1988), a painting by Amèlia Riera where the environment is maintained with a luminous density charged with fragile silences susceptible to the slightest sound scratch. I imagine the history of art as a map full of roads that intersect, widen and narrow, and all the painters walk along it at the same time, the living and the dead, and they set tables and prepare splendid banquets in which, moment and we still don't know why, no one sits down.

Mercè Vila Rigat
Exhibition curator

-catorze.cat