Josep Guinovart's career is characterized by constant experimentation. His restless spirit led him to tread on artistic grounds hitherto unexplored. In a difficult moment of lack of freedom like that of our post-war period, he managed to go beyond the limits of tradition, eliminate the border of genres and break the corsets of technique.

A threshold is the boundary between two (or more) realities. The painting does not stop being, after all, an intermediate space, a door or a window that allows us to glimpse the life that beats on the other side of the canvas. We do not say anything new if we affirm that Guinovart's work - for its vitalism and for constantly drinking from the reality and nature that surrounded him - closely approximates the pulse and rhythm of existence. We often see references to life's own thresholds: birth and death, night and day, cry and silence ..., or to the seasons of the year, well represented in the mural that presides over the Espai Guinovart.

The artist was aware of all this, and it is for this reason that he worked often and with multiple registers on the concept of threshold. We often see how his works are on the threshold of the word and the image, the line and the letter, the visible and the invisible, the form and the formless. Sometimes we find obvious and literal representations: a door, a window, a deep dark hole. Other times, a mirror opens the door to a new inverted reality and a ripe wheat that barely germinates is opposed to the death that lives in the basins of a skull. They are, after all, multiple faces of the same polyhedron, paths that place us on the threshold of the abyss, at the doors of mystery.

Bernat Puigdollers
Curator of the exhibition