Miquel Vilà

Barcelona, 1940

As Jordi Gabarró said, “Miquel Vilà perfectly symbolizes this struggle of today’s great painters against the death of painting”. He considers himself a defender of this artistic language. His work, like his personality, is expressive and direct. Critical, intense and dramatic. He uses subjective compositions and perspectives – apparently chaotic but always very studied – that are even disturbing: the physicality of his landscapes usually crystallizes in a world of a certain unreality, in the same way that the objects that inhabit his still lifes are almost always out of place, but for this very reason they attract in an unexpected way. The subversion of the real becomes one of the elements that define what Fontbona defined as Vilà atmosphere. Minimal still lifes and landscapes without a story: pure plastic art. His light is dramatic, like that of an autumn sunset. An interior, unctuous light, that seems to slide down the skin of the objects, or of the landscapes themselves.

He has chosen his predecessors and has never ceased to dialogue with them, especially those belonging to the Italian Novecento, but also some of his generation. His extensive career has led his work to be exhibited in galleries all over Spain, in addition to Italy, Switzerland and the United States. In 2004 Francesc Fontbona wrote a catalog raisonné on his work from 1959 to 2003. He has been exhibiting at Sala Parés since 1990.