Poetic lamp
Aquells Fanals was a novel written by the Catalan artist Felícia Fuster intellectually overflowing and a clearly autobiographical content. Born on January 7, 1921 in the popular fishing district of Barceloneta, in Barcelona, grew up between the bars of the naval hardware store owned by her maternal family. Saws and nails like the ones that forged her imagination took her to create an artistically dense work within a "small world or big house," as she defined her childhood environment, the origin of her beloved libertarian solitude, always open to the sea of the spirit. Her physical window closed definitely on 4 March in Paris. She had painted 91 years of search for freedom.
Her family was always very active, she inherited from his grandfather Rafael Viladecans the love of drawing. Her first teacher in school, Mrs. Teresa Calvet, found her interest in the study and in 1932 she joined the avant-garde school Institut de Cultura, excelling in all subjects. She had an incredible perfection in the drawing so it was recommended her admission at the Escola Massana d'Arts i Oficis which was really unusual for her young age and for what they had to overcome a lot of administrative obstacles. There she studied painting and various techniques combining all with her music studies at the Marshall Academy, founded by Enric Granados and Frank Marshall. She highlighted because of her brilliant musical ability to play the piano.
Felícia Fuster never ceased to show a tremendous creative capacity. In 1942 she enrolled at the Faculty of Fine Arts and during the ending studies trip with other colleagues founded the avant-garde group Los últimos that ended in a collective exhibition in 1947. It was a brief experience, but according to her quest for freedom of expression, which never left. During the fifties, fleeing Franco’s oppression, she began her international tour with exhibitions in Paris and New York. Paris was the place where she breathed enough to start from scratch. She combined management tasks in publicity agencies with her artistic work until 1981, when her economic situation finally allowed her to focus on the creativity. "Sometimes life sends you a wind that leaves you out of the way, and so it happened to me, wind me out of the path I was walking and leading me away from everything." Then poetry and painting became her only motor.
That new impulse materialized in 1983 with the poetry collection Una cançó per a ningú i trenta diàlegs inútils. Full of melancholy and a flavor of the Barceloneta of her childhood, both in smells and in phonetics, a beautiful Catalan as the one wrapped in the twenties, eclectic, out of all movement, her poetry appears as a splendid work. It was followed by Aquelles cordes del vent and I encara, all without leaving her pictorial work. She defined an own abstract style under the name Plurivisió thanks to a mechanical device created by herself that allowed you to see her work from different angles, taking you to different interpretations.
Her trips to the East, especially Japan and China, awakened her a fascination with the eastern culture that led her to publish an anthology of contemporary Japanese haiku poetry and write a book heavily influenced by that culture published in 2001, Postals no escrites. The lover of the sun brought us light from so many different angles that we’ll need an intense lifetime to discover them.
FELÍCIA FUSTER RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION here
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Nancy
Edvard Munch
Cindy Sherman
Eija-Liisa Ahtila
Oskar Mörnerud
CO Hultén
Alicia Larsson
