As the west winds move eastward, Barcelona artist Eduardo Arranz-Bravo brings the emotional power of 1960s Spanish abstract art back to Matthew Liu Fine Arts. In this third solo exhibition, "Present continu",  Arranz-Bravo will present new works created during the 2020-2021 pandemic.

 

In his recent works, Arranz-Bravo, who has always been consistent in his approach to painting, uses the two-dimensional brushstroke to present the three-dimensional natural form. In his latest work " Canarias" from 2021, the volcanic dog islands, leafy forests and dog-headed people in the southernmost part of Spain are shown in this exhibition. Flame-like red-orange color drenches the bottom of the painting, green branches emerge from the forest, and the opaque saturated black becomes a metaphor for the undercurrent of "dogs" worshiped by the indigenous inhabitants of the mysterious Greek legends. These inhabitants treated the dog as a sacred animal, even to the extent of mummification. Arranz-Bravo portrays his darker interests in his usual witty and playful tone. In this work, the main subject does not play with the form of gradation, which is different from the minimalist consciousness of contemporary expressionist painter Alfons Borrell's low-key color scheme and radical big color block rendering. Arranz-Bravo continues the influence of early American pop art. The combination of lively and bright multi-dimensional painting style and sometimes delicate and fine painting, sometimes large-scale throw-line strokes, create clean three dimensional natural forms. These unusual blocks of color and lines allow his works to move between figurative and non-figurative forms of expression.

 

One of the most representative artists of the May '68 generation, Arranz-Bravo's work represents the rebellious revelry of Franco’s late dictatorship and the early years of the democratic transition.  Influenced by the modernist masters Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso from an early age, Arranz-Bravo's innocent and playful themes have always been symbols that the viewer is eager to decipher. Just as the artistic conception of childhood comes into view in Arranz-Bravo’s abstract vision, where emotion is more than just a color, the landscape or objects we observe become his personal interpretation of the emotive body of abstraction. A few bright colors brighten the tonality of the picture. The composition, lines, strokes, colors, spontaneity, errors and textures on the canvas become a reflection of Arranz-Bravo's life that is at once extremely cautious and at the same time unconcerned, even careless. The high-profile use of color and the high sensitivity to color allows Arranz-Bravo to unconsciously deconstruct the objectively seen as composed of atoms in his world and recombine them into a new object view and abstract context. These straightforward conversations with color and graphics are at the same time a reflection of the simplicity of Arranz-Bravo's thinking over the last 60 years of his work.

 

Contemporary artists in the 20th century no longer focus on a particular school of painting, instead artists and viewers expect more unpredictable presentations after witnessing multiple overlapping styles and schools. The unpredictable Arranz-Bravo continues his fervent desire to create in this exhibition　" Present continu "──Creation goes on , stays in the present.　In the present moment, Matthew Liu Fine Arts invites you to enjoy the solo dance of Arranz-Bravo in the space of imagination in the midst of the epidemic, swaying to the flow of his hypnotic music.

 

Arranz-Bravo's works have been exhibited in the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, the Olympic Museum, the Grand Palais, the Paço Imperial and other institutions, and are also collected by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the State Tretyakov Museum, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and other institutions.