Joaquín Ferrer Guallar – inspired by Constructivism and music

It is the viewer who has to “finish” my works and the more divergent and proper their interpretations, the better

Joaquín, can you tell us about your artist’s path?

I was born in Caspe (Zaragoza) and it was there that I began my training at the Municipal School of Art, to later continue in a self-taught way. In 1995 I decided to dedicate myself entirely to what I had started as a hobby. Since then, I have submitted more than fifty individual exhibitions and participated in around of one hundred and seventy group exhibitions in different cities from Spain, Italy, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Portugal, Ireland, Sweden, Russia, Finland, Belgium, Switzerland, USA, Argentina, Japan, Uruguay, China, Monaco and Bulgaria.

What is your art about?

I started with the Figurative style (landscapes, portraits…) but moved to a surreal stage that served as a metaphorical way of denouncing social issues that concerned me, such as the economic exploitation of people and environmental resources. Later, I investigated the Bauhaus movement, the Gestalt … and great figures like Klee, Kandinsky, Kupka, Malevich… They made my works evolve towards a greater prominence of color and, finally, abandonment definitive of the figurative style, giving greater freedom to the forms, which led to a Geometric Abstraction.

Feguars. “Rojo sobre Negro”, 2006, Óleo sobre lienzo, 92 x 73 Cm

You have a great evolutionary path from Figurative to Geometric Abstraction. How can you describe your style now?

I like to describe my style as Abstract Impressionism.

Feguars. “Serenata”, 2004, Óleo sobre lienzo, 97 X 130 Cm

What does inspire you to create?

My other great hobbies are music and poetry. At first, they inspired only some of my paintings. However, they went gaining strength, perhaps influenced by the idea of the confluence of different arts, because of my admiration for singer-songwriters and for my evolution towards abstraction and artistic metaphor that I have explained before … all this was the origin of the style that I now follow and in which through color and forms more or less I try to capture the IMPRESSIONS that music and poetry they leave in me and that I try to convey to my viewers. AND I would also add the cinema, as we can see in some of my works based on soundtracks.

Feguars, “La Mañana”, 2002, Óleo sobre lienzo, 114 x 146 Cm

“La Mañana” (“The morning”). The work based on the musical work by Norwegian composer and pianist Edvard Grieg.

Music inspires you a lot!

When I talk about the influence of music on my works, I don’t only do it from the abstract level of sounds and their harmonies translated into colors and shapes, but also from their transcription on sheet music. The musical language, the graphic representation through notes, signs, lines … (fragmenting the “sound continuum”, in short) it seems much to what we do in any other manifestation artistic with reality, and even, what we do when we want to translate our thoughts into words. This coding the abstract into something concrete, has its advantages and its drawbacks, but it has always been necessary to to be able to transmit to others what we think, what we feel … and the most interesting thing is that, like every act of communication, needs not only an issuer (the artist), but also a receiver (the viewer) who, helped by his sensitivity, his circumstances … will decode that message and, the greatest wealth of artistic language is that it does not have to be the same interpretation for everyone, not even for oneself because it will depend on when you receive the “message” … To conclude, it is the viewer who has to “finish” my works and the more divergent and proper their interpretations, the better.

Thank you for your interesting story!