The intimate Bauzà

Mateu Bauzà (Palma, 1950) is part of a generation for which painting happens, not so much a way of understanding life, as life itself. He’s a man of calm, methodical, true to himself, theorist of the most refined abstraction, full of coherence, of measured conversation, with a more than laudable ability to create, to give life to a painting in balance.

Honesty is intrinsic to the name of Bauzà and an indestructible back and forth link between the painter and his work. This link is in each and every one of the layers, which are superimposed to create, not so much a blue, as the Blue. The painter enjoys personal and pictorial maturity, thanks to a calm disposition.

This calm does not contradict the agility when he theorizes, thinks and rethinks, he ponders. The honesty is such that it does not prevent access to his workshop notes. Capsules of the most intimate thoughts, where we find references in silence, spirituality, time, perception, reason, banality, nostalgia or color, which coexist with obvious references to Malevich, Judd, Klein, and less obvious to Morandi or Matisse. After a careful analysis, it is not difficult, then, to understand painting as a need to liberate and cleanse the soul. A type of therapy, in which emotions blend into the picture, exquisitely crafted, forceful and calm. A unique visual experience that seems to be layered.

Bauzà’s struggle is one of almost obsessive self-demand. The mention of balance is recurrent in the conversation. He acknowledges that he finds it in oriental practices and inevitably in painting. Bauzà has managed to grow, without it being easy. Balance is a state not in vain and continence is an exercise that requires inner peace, the one that the painter has known how to cultivate to compensate for the fears and insecurities that the world around us can generate, from which he does not shy away. Bauzà is a theorist who defends himself by painting, in an act of survival. Mateu Bauzà is painting, and painting is Mateu Bauzà.

Our position, the gaze, is not an easy path, despite the grotesque tendency to defend it with too simple arguments. It is nobler and worth the challenge of trying to live painting, with a clean and reflective look. The challenge is greater in the experience of the painting of Mateu Bauzà. The attraction that his painting exerts lies in part in the complexity and depth, which they well deserve, in an exercise of humility and healing, to deny vague statements.

Bauzà does not hide the pictorial sources from which he has drunk, drinks and will drink. Unlike other authors, he reveals research steps and years of study, numerous notes, that have allowed him to advance after all. He is not a man of frills. In his everyday life, he emerges from the materialism that can drown the soul. His painting, each layer, is a manifesto that deals with what is and is not necessary. Say it all with the right brushstroke.

At times, the visual experience seems to be reduced to an embrace of color. It is true that the color fields overlap, gaining an intensity that disarms us. But it is the theorization of color that seems to encourage Bauzà to express the deepest thought. To communicate with the world. The intimate Bauzà shows us the theoretical and emotional Bauzà, in equal parts. The brutality of Bauzà’s painting lies in this balance.

The sample that concerns us is honest and coherent thanks to paintings of slow manufacture throughout the last years, which coexist with the original graphic work, exquisite artistically and technically, fruit of the intense stay of the painter in the workshops of Workshop 6A during the last months. In intimate formats, not small, the compilation of the work is the result of years of research towards the most radical synthesis of who wants and has a lot to say, without burning everything. In an act of generosity, Bauzà paints. Bauzà speaks to us. He has the word.