JORDI PEDROLA

JORDI PEDROLA, WOODEN PAINTINGS

For Jordi Pedrola the universal language of art expresses itself in the strength of his Catalan roots, through contrast, gesture, and color. According to art critic, Amalia Martinez, "To confront Jordi Pedrola's works, is to confront and experience color."

"Seny" and "Rauxa", are two Catalan words meaning "common sense" and "madness".

The combination of these two words is the basis for the Catalan Culture. Jordi Pedrola, Catalan born in Barcelona, can't avoid these characteristics of his heritage. His landscape is filled with contrast, and this contrast is present in all his work. This contrast can be defined as "Rauxa" or "Madness".

The Mediterranean Sea is a special place, the origin of hundreds of Ancient cultures. Perhaps the most special of them all is Classic Greece. The Greeks brought civilization to Spain. By the time the Romans arrived, the Iberians had already adopted Greek values, or "Seny" (common sense).

Joan Miró once reflected that, where Catalonia best represented this "conflicted dogma" was the Southern province of Tarragona, where Jordi has his roots. His mother is originally from the village of Mont-Roig (Red Mount) where Miro did all his early work. This area includes Miro's famous "Catalan Farm". The Tarragona province not only has extraordinary rocky formations, created by the "Mistral" winds, it is also the birthplace of cubism, where Picasso and George Braque painted "a plein air" landscapes in the village of Horta de Sant Joan.

Jordi Pedrola's father is a furniture maker from the Cambrils sea port, near Mont-Roig. The Pedrolas have been carpenters for generations. Jordi's is the first generation to break this tradition. Since childhood, Jordi Pedrola has been taking wooden leftovers from his father's workshop, to paint on. This unconscious method of choosing the surface for his work has become a necessity for his paintings. Without consciousness, Jordi Pedrola was working over "objects trouvees" (ready made objects), so important in the Dada and Surrealist movements. The emotion of the art lies in its roots, in the choice of possible shapes and the touchable, warm little treasures of surface. This was something already familiar to the well known Barcelona painter, Joan Hernandez Pijuan, Pedrola's teacher at the University of Barcelona.
The"object trouvee" is very important to Art Nouveau architects, such as Gaudí or his protege Jujol. They both rather crazily include simple objects from country in their urban buildings. They both were also born in the Tarragona province. If Gaudí was an expressionist and surrealist, Jujol was possibly the best example of Dada and "Arte Povera" in architecture and design.

Jordi Pedrola was born in the city of Barcelona, and he spent his childhood in a historic suburb named Molins de Rei, a village with very refined examples of Art Nouveau buildings — examples which include his first home, named Ca'l Martí del Rec. Molins de Rei provided Jordi's launch on the adventure of painting and expression, through interior murals, graffiti, street performances and installations, leading to his execution of the ceiling of the local Theater Foment (1,800 square feet), the first masterpiece of his career.

The rich Romanesque Murals on display at the Art Museum of Catalonia, was the first art to catch his attention. It was because of the primitivism of the Catalan Romanesque — the hieratic position of the figures, the romance of their history, and the powerful, rich pigments — that Pedrola became a painter. Picasso and Francis Picabia also openly admired these paintings.

During his stay at the Winchester School of Art in the south of England, Pedrola became an abstract artist, interested mainly in the shapes of the wooden pieces found in the department of sculpture, and painting them a deep, dark blue, reflecting his obsession with Anish Kapoor mysticism. He arrived at Winchester as a Catalan Informalist and, four month later, he left as a painter of flat Symbolic panels, called altar pieces.

It would be two years later, after a long summer in Venice and Padua, before Pedrola would refind his Mediterranean roots and the powerful Metaphysical sense of its architecture, painting and comination urban-ancient culture. He loved Venice as the most beautiful city in the world, if only for its lack of cars, and the powerful and beautiful silence this bestows on its citizens. The city's gritty, urban quality provides the RIGHT balance to the pedestrian experience. Venice, for him, was not a place to float; it's a place to walk.

Since that first encountering with these Italian cities, the human face has been the great subject of Pedrola's paintings. Contemporary faces with deep eyes: deep entrances to the soul. The face provides an excuse for an abstract surface where colors fight and shapes balance tension. This "conflicted" combination could be called "Rauxa", and the control with which it's put together, "Seny". A perfect Catalan reflection of this "artist from Spain, citizen of the world, with strong ties to Italy", as the Verona newspaper, l'Arena, describes him.

An architecture of color is what Pedrola displays in his work. He makes his own paint, combining pigments with linseed oil, egg or wax, in pre-Renaissance fashion, and displaying his colors on a highly personal surface, unique to this poet and architect of paint.