top of page

LANDSCAPES OF MELANCHOLY

Exposición Elsa Peretti’s Foundation 

In Montserrat Clausells interior landscapes there’s a touch of melancholy which    doesn’t seem to spring from nostalgia but rather, as Eckhard Neumann would say, from a melancholy bearing the germs of a new life. As Eckhard say in his book  “ Myths of artists”, those germs, which break standard progress trought a separation of the usual forms of existence, may get to be “ the cradle of new hopes which , fed by utopia and reflexion, end up being a subtle introduction to the future “.

Obviously the artist is among those who do not live pursuing the giddy last trends and their imperious urgencies., but find solace in the quiet and solitude of landscape : in her work, it seems as if something has just happened or is about to happen, while all we can perceive is its absence.

Whether it’s about capturing the Passage of light ; or any of her  Nights or a Caress of the absent one, her wisely structured spaces always appear empty, and although threre’s nothing narrative about her paintings, one could say they’re portraits of an absence.

Her evocative approach to citites, her visions of New York in June, or Berlin, orphans of any humans presence, describe atmospheres which, suspended between utopia and imagination , reveal the magical tranquility of her fantasy.

Her work asks to be deciphered little by little, as we grow familiar with her language and the poetic  feeling  emanating from her paintings envelops and bewitches us.

Such absences are often troubling, with a touch of intrigue and desolations as in Balm, Territory of Colour. As for Ocaña, the composition is tainted with red as if to point to the fact that, on this occasion , the absence shows traces of death.

Like Eduardo Mendoza says as an introduction, “ It seems as if the profession had grown within her little by little, without revelations, as the result of an addition of factors.” Little by little and as the result of and addition of factors, surely; but the fact is that Montserrat Clausells, despite her youth, is a consummated artist, a painter with extraordinary expressive resources at her command, whose rigourous compositions and whose mastery of colour gradation  border on  virtuosim, not to say perfection.

MARIA LLUISA BORRÀS

@2019 Ubica Web Design

bottom of page