Woman on the chair, 1994

Jordi Maragall  

Jordi Maragall, grandson of the poet Joan Maragall, studied primary and secondary education at the Virtélia School in Barcelona. 

He began his painting and drawing studies at the Académia Valls, also in Barcelona. The first prize he won was for an early exhibition of students and alumni of the Virtélia School where he had competed with a work. 

Of him, the critic Alexandre Cirici had said that this distinction was due to the intention with which the work had been made. These are figures with a plain colored landscape background. 

After high school, he studied painting in the workshop of the painter Ramon Rogent together with Josep Roca, Pep Serra, Bosco Martí and others. He took part in some group exhibitions and offered a first selection of his works at the Sala Vayreda in Barcelona in 1959. He obtained a scholarship for an internship in Paris, from the Cercle Maillol (French Institute of Barcelona). Short stays in Madrid and Paris introduce him to the great museums of those two cities. Roualt occupies a prominent place in his preferences. However, being a clear predilection for the Romanesque that in Barcelona you can often see in the Museum of Art of Catalonia. 

In 1958 he made a 12 x 4 meter mural at the headquarters of Editorial Ariel. From 1962, he alternated figurative line drawing with abstractions in drawing and oils. The last years of its production have shown an expressionist trend that culminates with the exhibition Ten to Seven in January and February 1984.

Maragall's work expresses the sincerity that pictorially constitutes a value not only moral but exquisite. The colors, with a predominance of yellows, blues and carmines, of a strange soul combustion, are reminiscent of those of a Van Gogh or a Munch, painters with whom Maragall may have some kinship at least because those paintings, like his they seem to be the fruit of a very reversed intimacy towards their interior from external circumstances. The outline of Maragall's painting is of an extraordinary eloquence that is never lost in useless or insignificant details.