Tarrassó Casimiro M.

Casimiro Martínez Tarrassó,( 1900-1979 )  a painter known simply as Tarrassó. He was trained at the La Llotja School in Barcelona. He completed his studies in Paris, where he got to know first-hand the Fauvist works that were shaking the Parisian art scene at the time. This Fauve influence will continue to be palpable in his work throughout his life in features such as the strong chromatic contrast, the elevated and somewhat exaggerated perspective, the absolute disinterest in the human figure, which appears only sketched as a complement to the landscape, and the representation of trees as electrified, subjected to tortuous inclinations.

It is these formal features that give his works their own vitality and reduce their connection with the referential to a mere pretext. Tarrassó followed in the wake of the great Catalan landscape painters, paying particular attention to Joaquín Mir, although with a clearly differentiated personality due in part to the impact that Fauvism had on his artistic thinking. He cultivated still life and Catalan and Majorcan landscapes. He held his first exhibition in 1928 in Barcelona. Since then his shows have followed in Barcelona, Madrid, Palma de Mallorca and Bilbao. In 1935 he visited Mallorca for the first time, and from 1940 on he will have a studio there, specifically in Palma, where he lived for long periods and developed most of his artistic production.

After the Civil War, during the 1940s, Tarrassó took part in several National Exhibitions of Fine Arts, in their editions of 1942, 1943 and 1950.

Although the landscape was always the center of his production, Tarrassó also made works such as the mural decoration of the church of Santa María de Badalona. In Mallorca he also carried out a unique undertaking, planting his trestle in the Campanet caves to capture the stalactites and stalagmites from their stone cavities, developing a series of works that he presented in 1948.

Throughout his career, Tarrassó was awarded the Pollença Prize of the I International Painting Contest, in 1962; the Santiago Rusiñol in 1972; and the medals obtained in various editions of the Palma de Mallorca Autumn Salons: first in 1967 and 1973, and honorary in 1970. Tarrassó's work is characterized by the great personality of its color. His obsession with chromaticism determines a deeply sensory, vital and intuitive painting. In many of his works, the painter focuses above all on capturing an image that depicts the fullness of recreated life without a solution to continuity, worrying more about it than about the demands of the composition.