Jaume Ribas (Granollers, 1944) has always been loyal to the values of a cultural, aesthetic and intellectual tradition rooted into an unmistakable Mediterranean atmosphere of order, clarity, balance and harmony. Eager to approach practice, reflection and commitment as a whole, Ribas presents his personal interpretation of abstraction, giving prominence to the elements of painting language to then be able to fulfil his goal, i.e. making inner reality visible.
As his relationship with the discipline grew more methodical and after understanding it as an object in search of a meaning, he delved into the analysis of a number of elements like colour, line, geometry, space, surface, structure, format, boundaries, scale and matter, turning them into the subjects of pictorial practice. To him, this seems to be one possible answer to today’s painting situation, particularly, a proposal of a participatory process that actively involves viewers to understand the piece. Viewers are asked to reconstruct the process that resulted in the painting, to take over the mechanisms that give way to cognitive enjoyment while they watch the transparency or opacity attained by superimposing pigment layers; the absorption and reflection of the light; the way the composition is arranged; the line that shapes basic geometrical forms seeking to establish a dialogue between the figures and the background, bringing movement and creating meanings; the juxtaposition of planes trying to find their scale and presence; the conjunction of visibility and tactility; colour as a differentiating and at once unifying factor; the interplay of concealment and presence; a taste for variation; surfaces as fields of connections and forces, or void and depth echoing on colours, among other avenues for discovery.
The exhibition has been curated by art critic Rosa Queralt. It starts in 1990, when the artist staked the boundaries of his work with some identity features which stayed in his paintings all along, in other words, the use of lines to create basic geometries in the figure-background relationship, and the coexistence of transparent and atmospheric surfaces with dense and opaque ones, creating chromatic harmony and contrast; the second cycle is composed of coloured areas: large juxtaposed geometric planes become fields of connections and forces, sometimes perfectly outlined, sometimes with more porous confluence. Spanning from 2009 to date, the third phase is represented by a wide selection of works in which lines –in addition to creating the usual geometric shapes– intertwine or superimpose, bringing meaning and energy.
His production of drawings, graphic works and artist’s books runs parallel to his painting production.
