Guillem Ramos-Poquí

Recent Paintings 2006

In general terms each painting deals with a juxtaposition of multi-dimensional spaces, which are often landscapes, gardens, or scenes.

Images therefore float free from gravity and interconnect though colour sequences, as in a musical composition.

Composition means an overall geometry, which includes proportions, rhythms and patterns, and although I often make preliminary drawings to choose from, the final composition is arrived at purely intuitively, and not by a pre-meditated rational construction.

Colour sequences play with cold-warm modulations, also including those achieved but different degrees of hue saturation (or degrees of brightness or gray of a colour). Texture and colour become very important and are deeply interwoven so the surface becomes physically vibrant, tactile, for the purpose of energizing the dynamics of space.

Freedom from gravity means the use of several horizons, where images, in the ordinary scheme of things, may appear upside down or sideways, or embedded. Also means a creative disregard of relative scales and the combination of simultaneous interior-exterior viewpoints.

Perspective, therefore, is invented. It serves no other purpose than what it really is, a visual “perspective on things” rather than an illustration - or a conventional, scientific, formal exercise. Therefore, memory, creativity and imagination play here an important role.

Figurative or representational elements are only suggested, or hinted at and, as such, may only appear at the very last stages of the painting, and only once their background colours and textures are resolved in terms of overall composition. Their function is not to describe or illustrate but to enhance the definition of certain areas, without interfering with the overall impact of the composition as a whole.

The overriding intention is that the painting will, to begin with, impact the viewer by its sheer overall physical aesthetic presence, without being distracted by representational elements - these can be identified later by further scrutiny, if the viewer is interested in entering the work at an other level.

It is not, therefore, that the suggestion of figurative elements is superfluous or arbitrary, or that the painting is treated as an abstraction, but that the painting, as an artifact, is there to assert its own presence, a sense of what painting is through its physical qualities (size, colour, texture, etc) and, at the same time, acting as a door, or passage, to an inner vision of reality.

The inspiration behind the works derives from novels, metaphysical ideas, the journey through life, memory, and Scripture. The titles of some of the paintings are written in Latin or in Greek, with an approximate translation into English. Titles hint at the subject matter and as such are part of the painting, and when given in Latin or Greek it is because I feel these languages hold a timeless dimension.