Linked in its beginnings to pop art and new realism, Antoni Llena (Barcelona, ​​1942) is considered one of the most emblematic exponents of Catalan conceptualism of the sixties and seventies.

While some critics have identified conceptual approaches to desacralization of established contemporary art, such as a destructuring of the traditional concepts of painting and sculpture, the fact is that the displacement of the object by the idea gave rise to creative practices that have focused , above all, in the processes of conception of the work of art over and above its physical production. What someone has defined as process art.

This importance of the creation process is defining in the case of Antoni Llena, which focuses on the progressive reduction of the piece and the disaffection of everything that is superfluous or unnecessary. But, in the case of Llena, as in the case of Àngel Jové, the plastic materialization of this process is nothing more than the inevitable consequence of an intellectual and vital introspection. A metaphysics in which the essential concepts of art come out paradoxically reinforced.
The result is a naked work, devoid of all superfluous and dispensable rhetoric, light and fragile as the materials used: essential.

Carles M. Sanuy