Enric Ansesa (Girona, 1945) is one of the most well-known names in modern abstract art. He is from the generation of the second avant-garde, but given that he achieved success later on in his career, compared to his peers, his success straddles his generation and the following one. The art critic Francesc Miralles once described Enric Ansesa as “a concept artist that paints”. His artwork covers different disciplines such as installations, objects and pictorial art.
This anthological exhibition marks fifty years in Ansesa’s career and covers his evolution, focusing on the most iconographic aspects of a pictorial art that, from the mid-seventies to the present day, has had a common denominator: his paintings have always been made in the same tone, black.
Black is, therefore, his most important aesthetic reference point, and this duality of black as a colour/non-colour can be seen reflected in his work as darkness and light, sobriety and emotion, matter and drawing, or order and chaos: thus, becoming one of the central themes in his work. The black itself transforms the painting into a defined space without perspective, a flat plane upon which to work: there is no escape, no use looking for it, it does not exist.
As a result of questioning the surface itself the suture arises, which links to Lucio Fontana, one of the references who, along with the artistic ideas of Malevich and Joan Miró, will most help us understand the imaginary of Enric Ansesa.
The iconography of points, calligraphies, sutures and crosses have varied over time and according to the materials being used, but have still always been there within the same aesthetic and theoretical concept. Hence the title of exhibition, “Persistències”, which perfectly sums up an attitude and an artwork: “An artwork has to contain the whole universe within it”.
Toni Álvarez de Arana.