Francesc Artigau

Francesc Artigau (Barcelona, 1940) passionately defends painting’s artisanal dimensions. A painter and engraver, he trained at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios as well as at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Jordi (Barcelona). His work displays a constant presence of the human figure, in which he frequently installs urban landscapes built with a language not unlike that of Pop Art. An admirer of Piero della Francesca and of Matisse, Artigau plays with perspectives and illusionist effects in his treatment of such eternal themes as the figure of woman, the model, and the artist’s studio. With special gracefulness and delicacy, he superimposes successive layers of paint until he makes the scenes appear enveloped in a tenuous halo of colour, creating a poetic sensation that goes beyond quotidian reality. Not infrequently, painting and literatures conflate in his pictures and in other artistic projects, such as book illustration.