Small Fireworks at “Pla de la calma”

Exploration of the landscape theme is a recurrent feature in the work of the artist known as Perejaume. His almost obsessive research began in his early contacts with painting in the mid. 1970s, influenced by the area where he was born and grew up, the Maresme near Barcelona, with its particular orography of beaches enclosed by mountains, and the Catalan landscape tradition of impressionist and post-impressionist heritage that dominated among the local painters he hung out with, artists for whom, in his words, painting was still a rich form of agriculture.

His landscapes soon began to acquire a dreamlike character that drew him closer to the surrealists with the way he used painting and the introduction of strange elements in representation, as happens in Bas paisatge per l’as (1977), where two corners of a pair of aces of the suit of clubs in the Spanish deck break apart, showing the construction of the painting. Something similar occurs in L’encanyadura tenora (1977), where a floating broom appears above the forest, which could be thought to actas a theatrical background to a magic trick. A theatrical component in landscapes was present in his later career in series such as Pintura i representació from the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which he moves the seats of well-known arenas to natural spaces, or in Rambla 61 (1993), with a portable armchair the viewer can sit on to take in a view through a sculpture that reproduces a theatre front-of-house.

This consideration of landscape as theatrical backdrop and a skin that covers the world explains oil paintings such as Personatge contemplant l’informalisme (1985), in which the painting itself acquires these characteristics and becomes a landscape that includes -in the comer of the work where pigment is applied following the supposedly abstract methods of informalism- a railing over which a small character looks out, reminiscent of the passers-by of the nineteenth-century painter Caspar David Friedrich, linking the aesthetic category of the sublime, born in romanticism, with this movement of great importance in the development of Catalan art in the second half of the twentieth century.

This strategy of transforming pure painting into a landscape is continued in Small Fireworks at “Pla de la calma”, dated only one year later, with a skin of dark paint that lightens in the middle of the upper part forming a horizon, that of the plane of calm, without that plane being the surface of the painting itself. Here Perejaume paints three small flames – sparks as artificial as the other fireworks to which the title refers – each of which is one of the primary colours yellow, red or blue that form the basis of any of the other colours. A subtle manipulation and unexpected transformation of image that is common across all his works.

Sergio Rubira