Albert Pinya , Los Amigos del pintor
Los amigos del pintor, A solo show by Albert Pinya at EXHIBIT LAB
Castelar, 35 39004, Santander Spain
Opening: Friday September 8th
Exhibition dates: 8 September - 6 October
Albert Pinya, Trempó with capers and friend, 2023 Mixed media on canvas, 80 x 80 cm
Long awaited, Exhibit gallery presents the first solo exhibition in northern Spain of one of its most beloved artists, the Mallorcan Albert Pinya.
A great celebration of life, based on the knowledge of its fragility. This may be the unifying thread of the artist’s latest works, paintings and ceramics, which make up the project entitled “The painter’s friends”. The works have just left the studio and show the coherence of a career already consolidated in Europe, as well as a strong connection with Pinya’s usual interests: environmental awareness, the exaltation of nature and the idiosyncratic elements of the Mediterranean landscape and life. The rejection of a society like today’s, where what he calls techno-barbarism reigns, is raised by this optimistic and proactive creator with a wild painting, full of utopia, anti-academic, a painting of cheerful colours and abundance of details, a healthy painting.
Albert Pinya defines himself as an ultra-local artist, an artist of the Balearic terroir, of the sun and the stars, of capers, chives and flowers. Indeed, Pinya is the artist of personal experiences, of laughter, of looks, of family and complicity with the spectator. All these components become the painter’s friends, the motifs that provoke and unleash his work, full of biographical references.
The work “Salvem la posidònia. O visita a Aponiente con Anita y el Niño” is a statement, and it is also a formalisation of an Arcadian aspiration, a scene of the sea populated by the most beautiful and mysterious creatures: pelagias, aurelias and other jellyfish, and carpeted by the undulating clumps of the green posidonia that is in danger in the Balearic Islands. The balance that the work seeks with the saturated colours and the lively relationship of all the characters relate it to an idea of dependence, of respect and biological harmony, of an ecosystem of necessary interrelationships. The sinuous forms give the scene movement. In the midst of the vivacity of this jubilant party, the idea of change is always present.
The change is that of the clouds that move away and disappear, as in the work “The father and the son” dedicated by the artist to filial love, or that of the vegetable garden that evolves with the seasons in “Trempó with capers and friends”.
All of Albert Pinya’s scenes are gatherings of friends. The artist’s creative identity is also forged in his numerous collaborations with chefs, musicians, and especially with the ceramist Joan Pere Català-Roig, co-author of the stoneware works presented in this exhibition. The appreciation of teamwork and artisanal processes is a constant feature of his work. Pinya feels he is heir to a way of approaching artistic work that began in Mallorca with the collaboration of Joan Miró and Llorens Artigas in the 1940s. Disrupting hierarchies and prioritising process and communication with an ever-attentive receiver, Pinya involves us in his philosophical quest for a better life.