The Limits of Painting
The pieces that make up this installation offer different variations with black as the predominant element and various uses of color in subtle horizontal bands.
Their contemplation invites an aesthetic reflection on the limits of painting and, beyond that, on the factors of space and time and our role within them. Jordi Teixidor’s painting deconstructs prejudices and opens our minds.
The installation activates in the viewer a state of contemplation of the works through introspection, as if inside a temple. Teixidor speaks of the relationship established by the etymology of the word “contemplate”: “contemplari” (to observe attentively a delimited space) and “templum” (temple, a sacred place to view the sky).
Teixidor creates a space not for the works, but for the situation or state that the contemplation of the works gives rise to. As there is no subject in them, an indeterminacy is generated. There is no outside or inside, and in the paintings the indeterminacy continues, as there is no up or down.
The Landscape
This project stems from the artist’s research on the Laurentian Library carried out by Michelangelo in Florence. Teixidor references the space known as the “ricetto,” which provides access to the library, where one can see the closed, blind windows that so impressed Rothko.
The blind windows, windows to the outside not to see, but not to see, are a fundamental element for Jordi Teixidor, for whom painting is a way of coming into contact with our own interiority.
The door-window of the room opens onto the contemplation of the landscape. Jordi Teixidor’s relationship with the landscape has always been conceptual, reflective, intellectual, romantic, and literary. Not so much the landscape as a representation of nature or as a testimony of beauty, aesthetics, or color, but as a space that provokes reflection; not recognition, but reflection.
“My works do not respond to any form of representation of nature, but only and exclusively to ‘the idea of landscape.’ Nature has never motivated me, not even through color. My relationship with the landscape has always been conceptual, reflective, intellectual, romantic, and literary. […] What has motivated me is the concept of the horizon, that of the separation of similar elements.”
Tragic Expression in Contemporary Spanish Painting
National Prize for Plastic Arts 2014 and considered one of the foremost representatives of Spanish abstraction.
A scholar of art history, philosophy, and poetry, and an admirer of Matisse in his most synthetic form, Jordi Teixidor develops a rational, balanced painting that is strongly restrained in its expressive elements. His work invites thought and rejects any narrative reading.
His work must be understood as an aesthetic and intellectual reflection on the limits of painting, as the unattainable desire to create the definitive painting—the non-painting.
Through his use of black, Teixidor has formalized a sequence of images that constitutes one of the most outstanding tragic expressions in contemporary Spanish painting.
