The word ‘architect’ derives from latin ‘architectus’, which comes from the combination of the two Ancient Greek terms ‘archos’ (‘guide’) and ‘tekton’ (‘builder’). The architect is the ‘guide of the construction’ (the construction manager). Architecture is defined as the art and technique of creating inhabitable physical spaces.

There is another architecture that is essential and intrinsic to the individual.I am talking about the architecture of the deep and intangible atmospheres that formusas people and determine our relationships with ourselves and with others. Each of us conceive, project and build aprivatespace that we inhabit. Consciously or not, and through a complex framework of elements —experiences, thoughts, feelings, emotions…— we are the ‘guides’, the ‘construction managers’, the architects of our privacy.

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MontseClausells’ artistic language talks to us precisely about those essential “secret” lines that make us function as human beings —the guides that lay the foundation for and give meaning to our inner ‘city’. Scenes where we can find structures, tensions, balances, weight, fusions, different spaces, several depths, openings and closings… This artist’s pictorial universe is not that of physical nor abstract landscapes, but metaphysical: the landscapes of the architectures of the soul.

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The first time I saw one of MontseClausells’ works I identified the splashes of colour, the whites, the blacks, the fog, the geometrical shapes… Later, in the colour I discovered overlapped pigment layers and the glaze or transparencies between them; the whites were not paint anymore and became light, just as black turned into darkness; I sensed the mistas empty spaces, and the geometrical shapes as the lines that supported them. Those layers and transparenciesconnected me with the passage of time,with phases, with journeys, with growth and with development. The white light connected me with energy, hope and the possibility of flowing. The darkness of the blacks, with the ‘I’ —the strength, the potency, the toughness, the robustness, the ‘ego’ presence that coexists with thecloudyvolatility of insecurity and with the rigidity and stagnation of lineal containment.

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Montseposes a single question, an essential one, one that encourages introspection, but her canvasses offer infinite answers —as many as the individualities that are contemplating them.