MANIFESTo sobre ART y Libertad/AforisMoS
Mateo Vilagrasa
“Art is offering, loneliness and vice”
Manifesto sobre art y libertad/ Aforismos is the last project that Mateo Vilagrasa worked on before he died.
In the opening act of the exhibition by Álex Susanna we will present the posthumous book that the Mateo Vilagrasa Foundation edited and published in a limited and handmade edition. The exhibition presents all the originals, the video of Viaje de invierno (Adiós) and a selection of paintings that have started from the content of the project.
The posthumous and limited book by the artist Mateo vilagrasa that was edited and published between 2021-2022 by the Mateo Vilagrasa Foundation. It is a handmade edition of 74 copies numbered from 1 to 74+ 7 copies numbered from I to VII (Roman numerals) with the artist’s signature, with 42 original drawings and 2 lithographs: On the pedestal and there is always some god who will provide numbered and signed by the artist, presented in a conversation box with two handmade trays.
It also contains 9 photographs of the artist and his studio in Poble Nou. The book has an introductory text written by Paco García Estupiñá and a series of aphorisms written by Mateo Vilagraso himself about the drawings.
350 € (IVA incluido)
“There is a disturbing and powerful space in which opposing forces fight. A space devoid of perimeter, without end or beginning, whose purely transitory limits appear drowned in the mist of other spaces that expand in an infinite whirlwind. That space, subjected to the game of mirrors of chaos, is perhaps paradoxically, the space of an idea.
Perhaps for that reason Vilagrasa’s latest proposals tend to exalt, in a spatial continuum, the intimate sphere of man with the common sphere of the inhabitant and both, in turn, with the cosmic sphere of being. The epic vision transcends, thanks to this, the various scenarios to perch on that ungraspable horizon whose approach is only allowed to the thought that knows how to become a sensation.”
Rafael Argullol, ASB Gallery Catalog, Barcelona 1990.
In collaboration with
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
MATEO VILAGRASA
“The thinker who paints knows that painting is limited to painting the light that reflects the membrane that hides the profound. It consists of trying to transfer the profound to the surface, in order to be able to see only its interpretation.”
Born in San Rafael del Maestrazgo (1944), Valencia. In the early seventies Mateo Vilagrasa travels for the first time outside Spain and travels to Paris and Germany, where he connects with the German expressionism of Pechstein, Nolde, Beckmann and the abstract expressionism of Pollock. A year later he enters the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. After abandoning his studies, Vilagrasa established his main residence in Frankfurt where he stayed for a few years and studied engraving, lithography and photography. In 1976 Vilagrasa returns to Spain and two years later settles in Barcelona where he will develop new forms.
In 2018 the artist passed away at the age of 74 in La Cardosa, Spain.
In addition to being a member of the Professional Association of Visual Artists and co-founder of the Frankfurt Art Collective, The Mateo Vilagrasa Foundation (FMV) was created in 2005 to accommodate a physical and institutional space in which to preserve and disseminate the artist’s work.
He has exhibited in countless galleries and institutions in Spain, Germany and Frankfurt, among others. The last exhibition was held at the Contemporary Museum of Castellón on February 24, 2023.
It is part of collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, Spain or the collection of the Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, Germany.