A contrary Catalan in search of the thousand faces of God

He is billed a stalwart of the Catalan conceptual scene, but Ferran Garcia Sevilla clearly caught the expressionist bug in the 1970s, as can be seen in an Imma exhibition

GIVEN THE expressionist exuberance of the paintings in Ferran Garcia Sevilla’s exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, it’s quite startling to learn that he was a stalwart of the Catalan conceptual art scene in Barcelona in the 1970s. We don’t associate conceptual art with big, meaty, gestural paintings of imaginary beasts, quirky scenes of personal mythology and wild splashes and drips of bright colour, but that’s pretty much what fills the upper floor of Imma’s east wing.

It’s a fair bet that what happened to Sevilla was the arrival of neo-expressionism towards the end of the 1970s. Just when it seemed that conceptual art had taken over the world, suddenly it was okay to paint pictures again.

Sure enough, the work in Imma spans the years from 1981 to the present. For a while around the middle of the 1980s, the paintings are almost like parodies of neo-expressionism. Drawn and painted with deliberate crudeness, often boldly coloured, and charged with all sorts of heady personal symbolism, they look very much of their historical moment. Take them in the context of the show as a whole, though, and a more interesting, persuasive picture of Sevilla emerges.

Writing in the catalogue, Imma director Enrique Juncosa reckons that Sevilla’s move into drawing and painting wasn’t inconsistent. It stemmed from his own character. He is, suggests Juncosa, something of a contrarian who “has maintained the aura of a provocative and difficult artist . . . the subject of the highest praise as well as the most virulent attacks”.

He is someone who has “consistently refused to play the game”. For nearly 10 years from 1998, for example, though he worked productively, he gave up exhibiting because he felt he couldn’t go along with the idea of art as commerce.

Even early on, as a conceptualist, he was a contrarian. Born in Palma de Majorca in 1949, he went to Barcelona in 1969, where he studied history and philosophy, with leanings towards leftist and critical theory.

In Barcelona he was part of an extensive, loose grouping of artists and intellectuals who congregated in the neutral territory – this was still the era of Franco – of the German Institute. The conceptual movement was very engaged, politically. Sevilla engineered many politically pointed artistic gestures himself. Once, Juncosa notes, “he killed five chickens and used their blood and carcasses in an exhibition” as a symbol of the last five people condemned to death for political reasons in Spain.

Yet, as Sevilla himself acknowledges, he didn’t fit comfortably into the political-conceptual template. He refused to go along with the vast majority of conceptual artists in Barcelona and sign a manifesto against the distinguished Catalan painter Antoni Tàpies. He began to work on an MA in which he argued that art had only a restricted role in the political arena. He looked instead to “its limits and reserves, its tricks for saying the unsayable, its silences, its mystical qualities”.

He felt Taoism and other strands of traditional Chinese thought underpinned and perhaps overshadowed Mao’s revolution. He became interested in magical and mystical aspects of philosophy, and read keenly JG Frazer’s classic comparative study of mythology and religion, The Golden Bough, and other works of social anthropology.

Alarm bells doubtless rang among his conceptual colleagues. “I suppose,” he observes bluntly, “that some of them saw me as a louse who screwed up the revolutionary process.”

He felt the revolution should have a much wider agenda than a narrow view of social progress. His agenda included the visionary and the mystical. “Artists,” as he put it, once they orientate themselves, and “clear the ground, set out on a journey to discover the thousand faces of God, to put it bluntly.”

That is more or less what he’s been doing ever since. He began to draw and then to paint. He was one of a number of Spanish artists who, in the great post-Franco cultural thaw, gained a presence in the international cultural arena.

“He prefers to talk about any subject,” Juncosa remarks, “rather than explain his own work.” He feels it should be completely open to interpretation.

The thousand faces of God certainly feature in the frenetically energetic, graphically inventive paintings of the early 1980s. The Golden Bough was vital to him, not because he uses it as a source book, or because he’s nostalgic in his view of myth, but because its way of looking at patterns of custom and belief provided him a methodology.

As Juncosa emphasises, the point about Sevilla is that he applies his methodology to the contemporary world in an attempt to devise “a universe of personal symbols that refers to the present”.

Ferran Garcia Sevilla Paintings. Imma, Royal Hospital, Kilmainham