IN MEMORY OF JOSEP SERRA LLIMONA

A small selection of his works is enough to give us an idea of Josep Serra Llimona’s production: extraordinary ability highlighting his ‘motives’ wherever he was, but also where we least expected them. Endowed with great skill and plastic versatility, he always painted as a thanksgiving act. Therefore, we can see all his work as a gratitude diary towards that life that daily surprised him for one reason or another: landscapes, seascapes, urban views, portraits, interiors or still lifes, any portion of reality – however small or apparently insignificant it might be: for example, the magnificent still life with garlic knobs – could lead him to draw or paint with an ever-renewed strange energy. This is the only way to understand his ability to overcome the Parkinson’s disease he contracted when he was barely forty years old.

Painting as an everyday exercise in celebrating life in all its inexhaustible range of pretexts, but at the same time as a creation of a realistic world, liven and pulsating than reality itself. He was totally convinced that life needed art to affirm and recognise itself. Without his ‘Franciscanism’, as discreet as it is effective, his work would not be fully understood. Serra Llimona had the immense privilege of waking up every day convinced of his mission on earth, and this is what gives his whole work an incredibly special tone and light: never painted for the sake of painting without being totally convinced that in each piece he was able to convey the singularity – the uniqueness – of whatever he intended to recreate. It has not yet been a year since he passed away, and his twenty or so paintings in this small exhibition bear witness to this.

Alex SUSANNA