Okika

Vicenç Viaplana

18/11/87. (Sala 093)

From 18 November – 12 December 1987

Vicenç Viaplana’s paintings monographically dedicated to the city discover the sinister and agonizing aspect of the contemporary city. Viaplana does not give us a version of the urban landscape of the cities we have closer to us like the Mediterranean, but a prototype of the 20th century city, one that has set the trend of skyscrapers, vertical architecture and a dense layer of a black loaded atmosphere.

Dense painting, strong contrasts between black and red, thick black strokes like tar, show a decadent, agonizing version and a permanently destructive urban environment which we now live in, through an exalted stage of architecture, that are presented as swarms where humans live, in impersonal and homogeneous buildings.

In some paintings, it is as though he wants us to notice the lead content in the city through the use of silver greys, while in others the presence of gold ambiguously refers to the artifice and adornments that underlie this chaotic and spectacularly expressionist mare magnum. There are aesthetics of fear and distress, which puts us in an infernal and claustrophobic picture of the burning city characterized by the absence of the human.

If the issue of urban culture and the image of the city are common to many painters of the new generation, little have they achieved in offering such a coherent and splendid whole like Vicenç Viaplana presents today. Perhaps it is because his work rests on more than 10 years of painting, perhaps because he is an author that is not in a hurry, maybe because he likes a job well done, the fact is that Vicenç Viaplana demonstrated in this exhibition that he is able to go beyond the pictorial fact itself and the purpose of the specific language of the painting to offer all its potential narrative character.

Pilar Parcerisas
“Avui” 30 October 1986.