JOSÉ LUIS PASCUAL SAMARANCH (Barcelona, 1947)... Lot n° 7

JOSÉ LUIS PASCUAL SAMARANCH (Barcelona, 1947). "Homage to Magritte". 2005. Corten steel. Size: 240 x 100 x 140 cm. In this sculpture, the profile of a character with a bowler hat is cut out in front of a door cut out with the profile of the same figure. The allusion to Magritte is clear, as a tribute that Pascual Samaranch pays to the surrealist painter, master of unfolded worlds and games of illusion. The Barcelona sculptor has developed his imaginary on the basis of the play of planes, shadows and silhouettes, which is once again evident in this piece. A painter, sculptor and engraver, José Luis Pascual studied architecture at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Barcelona, where he graduated in 1970. Since the beginning of his career, he has produced and edited several books, of which "Monografía destructiva sobre la comunicación gráfica" (1975) is the first. Since then he has produced other books and folders of lithographs and engravings, presented in such outstanding galleries as René Métras and Gaspar (Barcelona), or Sen (Madrid), in Biennials such as the International of São Paulo (1981) and Venice, and in other centres such as the Arnau Theatre in Barcelona (1986). He has also ventured into the disciplines of video art, sculpture and poster art, as well as creating several trencadís murals. Pascual has exhibited his work in Spain, Italy, Brazil, Belgium, Switzerland, France, the United States and Andorra, and develops a multidisciplinary figurative language based on the play of silhouettes and planes. His work evolved, from the 1970s onwards, from an expressionism limited to black and white to a language close to pop at the end of that decade, integrating colour and elements from comics. In the mid-1980s he began his period of wrought iron sculptures that describe profiles or silhouettes, as if they were the shadow of a figure, within a poetics that seeks to emphasise a kind of immateriality or lightness of the concept summarised in planes, with the almost total absence of volumes. When this repertoire is translated into painting, from the late eighties onwards it acquires certain neo-expressionist tints, sometimes approaching abstraction, especially through the formal recourse of his zigzagging lines and the rhythmic decomposition of those sketchy profiles of his sculpture.