THE TIME MACHINE I

This exhibition began 30 years ago, when I went to Morocco for the first time.

With some friends and a rental van, we crossed Spain and we and we went to the Moroccan border with the conviction and adolescent naivety that we were going to do something important. In fact, for us it was like that, on the short ferry ride we took a trip back, from the 20th century to the middle ages in a short time.

Chilabas, women carrying heaps of firewood, squatting men wandering in the beads, donkeys, smells, light … It was truly an initiatory journey, all it was new for us, or rather old.

30 years later I have returned. Now with the idea of finding inspiration for a new series of paintings. Without any pretension, with the clear awareness of being a western tourist, with the return ticket in your pocket and the camera hung around your neck.

I walk through the markets and Medinas with wide open eyes to see how to capture the atmosphere and the light of this country, shooting the camera shutter convulsively.

This is how this series has been generated. What comes next are many hours of painting in the studio, looking for hidden treasures in the thousands of images turned to the computer and looking for a painting that transcends and connects me with that first impression that a few years ago caught us. Mixture of reality and exotic deposit that leave a good number of readings and movies on Saturday afternoon.

The exhibition also presents the series Fragile City, composed of large-format works of Barcelona, a tribute to the city seen from the immense fragility through the current situation. Accustomed to painting faraway places, the impossibility of travelling has forced me to look at and value what is close by and which, because it is so well known, we often do not pay as much attention to as it deserves.