El blau i el fons, 1982

Josep Guinovart   Emerging artists

El blau i el fons (The Blue and the Background) is a 1982 lithograph coloured by hand by Josep Guinovart, issued in an edition of 75 copies. The composition is organised like a window or a frame: a broad border of mottled ochre and yellow surrounds a band of lilac and violet washes, which in turn encloses an almost bare rectangle of cream paper. Across the lower part of this empty field, a delicate scaffolding of fine black lines, like a fragment of a fence, a ladder or a diagram, holds a cluster of intense blue shapes and small dark squares, while a few isolated strokes cross the upper area. The title stresses the dialogue between the vivid blue and the 'background', between sign and field, colour and void. The fluid, watery textures of the lithographic washes and the touches of hand-applied colour give each impression a particular freshness. Josep Guinovart (Barcelona, 1927–2007) was one of the major figures of Catalan art in the second half of the twentieth century, associated with Informalism and known for his material, poetic abstraction rooted in the landscape of rural Catalonia. The impression is hand-signed and dated '82 in pencil at lower left and numbered at lower right.