A landscape of colour, stillness and poetry: Miquel Ibarz in November’s «Storage Insight»

Painter and printmaker, Miquel Ibarz (Mequinenza, Zaragoza, 1920–1987) was part of the second Catalan avant-garde and was known for his expressive, colourful figurative art, influenced by Cubism, Fauvism and abstraction.

In Marina Baixa, he depicts a group of white houses, an intensely blue sea and a sky in violet tones, where colour transforms the landscape into a composition that invites the viewer to pause and take it in.

The buildings are reduced to simple geometric shapes, while the coastline unfolds in planes of ochre, pink and greenish hues. The brushstrokes and overlapping layers reveal the process behind the construction of the painting. The landscape remains recognisable, but shapes and colours take on a significance of their own.

Chromatic intensity coexists with the stillness and melancholy of a place devoid of human presence. Balancing figurative representation with the simplification of forms, the work offers us a poetic vision of the landscape, one that is more evocative than descriptive.