Few artists in our context have been as directly occupied and tied to the question of time as Guinovart. Guinovart is a genuinely modern artist (and in this sense, nowadays, as inactual as necessary): that is, he participates in the conviction (or better, the will) that humanity must be able to progress, to advance in the time using it to improve the dignity and living conditions of both the individual and the community. But, qualifying the evolutionary linearity of the Christian tradition and technocratic rationalism, Guinovart knows that time must be accompanied, that you must work with it instead of fighting against it to take advantage of wisdom and growth. To explain this temporary complicity of Guinovart, we have divided the exhibition into three areas that reflect its dimensions and uses.

Death, night and burn: an end or a beginning. One of the recurring iconographic motifs in Guinovart is the skull, which acts as a kind of sinister warning about the presence, sometimes hidden but inescapable, of death. Finitude and destruction would be part of life. The nocturnal darkness, the black of the burned (for example, of the stubble) recall the destruction of war or denial, but also the processes necessary to prepare the crop or the interval for the resurgence of the day.

The creative work and the cultivation cycle. Guinovart does not seem to share either the apocalyptic fatalisms that for centuries have frightened men or the cultural arrogance that pretends to be able to dominate the world omnisciently, as if humanity were not also fragile. Therefore, since its inception, has been attentive to the rhythms of nature, invincible, always revived. The peasant tradition shows the path of respect and the necessary attention to the biological rhythms. The agrarian culture is, for Guinovart, a model for artistic creation and a form of active redemption.

The memory and the ethics of the future. The egg, like the seed, is a symbol of fertility. Time, for Guinovart, is also, in the human space, history and utopia. Memory (with Picasso's Guernica as an emblem) is necessary to make possible the balm of remembrance and the sense of justice in the future. The undoubted and white light is the affirmation of trust in the future better and it is this confidence that gives entity, strength and meaning to time.

Alex Mitrani