«Two half moons make a circle» shows a fundamental part of the work of Romà Vallès (1923-2015), one of the greatest references of informalism and the abstract expression of our territory around the fifties and sixties.
The exhibition is a testament to the constant stir-etarn between artist and creation, a field in which he never stopped exploring. The selection incorporates pieces from the sub-series Colorama and Mundo roto, from which we receive the traces of the visual heritage that, in permanent gestation, created Roman Vallès. The strength and vulnerability of their style, necessary to carry out these pictorial transformations, appear full of tensions and convergences.
The chosen pieces are provided as a connection point between Romà Vallès and Josep Guinovart, which also incorporates this technique in much of its artistic creation. In both artists, the collage, either of images - as in the case of Vallès - or of objects - such as wood, wheat and stubs, representative of the work of Guinovart - speaks to us of a world marked by the footprints of the human being.
More specifically, the collages of Romà Vallès transpose fragments of newspapers selected in a conscious and intentional way that, together with the paint, compose by layers the visual and discursive narrative of different singular events that took place in the sixties, Artist creates a deviation from the reality communicated in the media.
The images chosen by Romà Vallès present what is sensual and what is political as a symbol of pleasures and violence exerted on the bodies. The artist's intervention transforms the consensual social story that shows an active separation between the categories mentioned, in order to express their unity, a unit that appears on the surface and that does so by recovering some of the shared questions that we have relegated to the plan of what is obvious. Is it possible to think what is sensual and what is political as faces of the same prism? Is there a predetermined conception about how to understand what is sensitive? It is here that the painless artist's artistic gesture modifies, through this material illusion (image-painting) and conceptual (sensual-political), the reception of the viewer.
From everything fragmented, broken and marginal, the collage allows intuition of a type of acrobatic exercise that investigates and reverberates in what is already manifest. In Romà Vallès's pieces, one is surrounded by a plot that, although apparently fictional, is a metaphor of a reality seen through the selective look of the artist.