“Rome has really placed food at the center of my life. You can say that my city experience has initiated and developed through eating - late night dinners, lavish house parties, or even finding my local everyday lunch spot. As the food here is absolutely delicious, it really impacted my senses and it now constitutes a core of my Roman memory bank. And this exhibition captures for me an implicit registry of these precious moments lived around the table, meals and new friendships”, summarizes Ignasi Monreal (Barcelona, 1990) of Plats Bruts, his first exhibition at La Fresh Gallery.

The Catalan artist, who has been using the iPad to illustrate advertising campaigns as his only tool, is now doing the reverse: from the digital to the tangible, from the touch screen to the canvas and oil. Inspired by Madrilian Realism and still lifes of the Italian and Spanish Baroque, he presents a series of works that adopt the presence of everyday objects, plates and dirty trays that, seen at a distance seem real.

Monreal resorts to figurative realism to exploit trompe l'oeil as an ironic element. “Maybe Instagram, post-truth or fake news have been unconscious inspirations,” he jokes while quoting Caravaggio: “Art must reflect the pulse of life with all its nuances and obscurities, however trivial they may seem”. Plats Bruts is exactly that: an unpretentious celebration of the mundane, a Wabi-sabi 'cañí'.

Laid down on tables, and not on a wall, these paintings aspire to become artifacts of subversive charge. They are apparently inane pieces condemned to live among other objects waiting for someone to discover them, infiltrating daily life as a guerrilla act.

This series is the result of what has been the life of Monreal in recent months: a well-deserved break after months of frenetic commercial work, creating commisioned artworks for companies such as Gucci, Four Seasons, Dior and Louis Vuitton. In this time, his style has been refined by force, filtered by hundreds of gigabytes of illustrations painted against the clock, but with these dirty dishes he begins his return to Fine Arts with a body of work created under his own initiative, following only his instinct and confronting the material dimension of art: drying times, chemical processes of oil and going from two to three dimensions. “It's been a fascinating relearning process, like using sex toys for the first time with your life partner.”

Neither the appearance of the works has the digital neatness of his previous creations, Plats Bruts is presented as something new and different from his most recognized work. “I took this opportunity to do something 100% mine, this is what happens when you give me three months of freedom.”

Plats Bruts
February 2019
La FRESH Gallery, Madrid

Paintings by Ignasi Monreal
Curated by Topacio Fresh
Text by Lucas Arraut & Carlos Primo