Ferran Garcia Sevilla at Joan Prats - Barcelona, Spain - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, June, 1995 by Kim Bradley

This 45-year-old Spanish artist has always been something of a provocateur. In the late '70s, his rebellious nonconformity put a bitter end to his association with conceptual artists in Barcelona. After that brief stint as a creator of politically based books, installations and performance art, Garcia Sevilla returned to his birthplace, the island of Majorca, and began painting. There, he turned out raw, colorful, primitivist canvases often peppered with caustic, hand-scrawled commentaries about life and politics. These paintings, which made Garcia Sevilla one of Spain's rising stars, showed the influence of Miro in their automatism, playfulness and use of flat symbols and figures floating over solid grounds. On a more contemporary note, their intentionally crude handling suggested a happy-go-lucky Basquiat.

Most of the recent paintings that made up this show--20-odd, in large and small formats--are considerably subdued, although in the case of 31-3-93 a spartan composition is used to powerful effect. In this work, a crucifixlike form of joined, richly colored vertical and horizontal posts stands out boldly against a deep black background. Resting at the base is the profile, outlined in white, of an archetypal wise man's imposing head and jutting beard. The painting seems like a visual incantation to God.

Another black painting, 4-3-94, this time distressed by surface scratches and laced with thin yellow drips and splatters, features a red flower and a tiny, horned, one-eyed skull. Starting in the upper right corner of the painting, two white lines angle in and intersect. It's tempting to see them as representing the intrusion of logic into a bleak cosmos, one punctuated by symbols of death and nature.

By contrast, other works are almost vapidly pretty. In Sino 38, the motifs include a curling vine issuing from a mysterious geometric form, clusters of dark handprints and blue-winged insects, and variously colored blobs. These elements swim in a washy ground of lovely fleshy pinks, reddish oranges and warm yellows. At the bottom of the painting is a border of radiating lines and polka dots in green, purple and blood-red.

Also highly decorative, 21-4-94 treads dangerous ground. Despite Garcia Sevilla's provocative past, the purely ornamental use of swastikas as a central motif seems gratuitous and inconsistent. Turning to ancient and non-Western sources, this painter has long employed religious symbols--hand, circle, tree, triangle, cross--but his aim (and talent) has been to empower, and also challenge, these charged forms, not to trivialize them, as he does in 21-4-94.

An agile painter, Garcia Sevilla still knows how to charm, but his latest works often lack bite and, at times, conviction. Perhaps what they signal is an introspective, transitional period.