Catalan artist Ramón Enrich harnesses his passion for architecture in his paintings of geometric and colourful landscapes. Inspired by rationalist and African architecture, Enrich creates landscapes of geometric shapes with a non-human reference point placing buildings at the heart of the canvases. Within a grid-like structure reminiscent of city planning, flat roofs, never ending staircases and barren, lifeless landscapes render the architecture functionless creating a surrealist and spell-binding feel. As if the sun is approaching objects from multiple angles, the elusive light accentuates various perspective shifts developed in his own artistic realm where ideas of space, abstraction and composition can continually be explored. Always with a particular and enigmatic atmosphere, his paintings reference Mediterranean culture and a spatial conception where colour and the design of spaces have no time or place.
Read More"Architecture gives me great pleasure. I find composition, landscape, and spatial perception a source of inspiration. It is form and function, and poetry and mathematics in one. Architecture and architectural painting allow me to play around with fiction and the mystery required to show the symbolic power of elements."
Enrich's paintings are most striking in their deceptive simplicity. Shapes become more important than the objects they represent, pushing this to the limits of abstraction. Trees and bushes are reduced to simple cone, sphere and cube shapes just like the buildings themselves. This formal strictness is accompanied by a warm, bright colour palette creating an uncanny effect recalling elements of De Chirico's metaphysical period, as well as Minimalism and Surrealism. This expressive language reduces elements within the paintings to their symbolic resonance, using this alphabet of features in a way that challenges convention, proposing a psychological rather than formal journey.
Ramón Enrich studied Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona, following which he was awarded numerous scholarships to study abroad. A great admirer of Donald Judd, he moved to Marfa, Texas in 1988 where Judd lived and worked, spending time at the Judd Foundation and the Chinati Foundation. He travelled to Los Angeles where he met Ed Ruscha and worked with David Hockney before settling in New York and assisting in Julian Schnabel's studio for a short time. He has exhibited worldwide for almost 25 years and now lives and works in Igualada, Spain. His works are held in public and private collections worldwide, most notably the private collections of David Hockney, Norman Foster and Donald Judd.
Text courtesy Cadogan Gallery.
