Cezanne had it very clear: it could only be the subject of mental speculation and painting what was presented to the eyes; to get it, he walked and suddenly stopped in front of something when its chromatic structure was not very clear to him. He did know very well how the forms were, he was taught about that at school. But how they looked like, was another matter, his fellow Impressionists had told him that there were no forms but colors, luminous vibrations modified at every instant. In any case if any color was permanent, it kept itself over a powerful moment, and this fact was only possible through an artificial exercise called painting. As he thought - he had been taught in primary school and nobody denied it in the school of fine arts - things actually existed and they were not momentary impressions, so he decided to devote himself to painting to demonstrate that what he had learned was actually true. The realities are the colors used by the artist to paint. If somebody approaches to a strong and autonomous object, when the object is taken, the gesture that traps it alters the thing, not because of the shadow, but for the interference of colorful entities. The artists converts everything that is on the environment into himself, his existence. What surrounds us has the properties we attribute to.
This is what Imma Pueyo says and paints: from my study and my study is myself in my projetion towards my environment, I realize that an alife reality exists, that grows, changes of color, softens, disappears, transforms, modifies, moves; depending if I look left or right, it breaks or thickens, or it gets harder with a single insistent and impenetrable color; but then this mass immures and becomes monochromatic: the proximity removes the hues to offer only colors.
With this chromatic reality that we constantly touch, maybe it's worth to ask to ourselves whether painting is a matter of lights or colors. If things are what we see, when we paint there are only colors around us; to paint is to create colors, to mount colors according to our desire or to our needs. No worries about an hyphotetical hue or a local color; the color that corresponds is the one the balances our sensitivity.
And this is the sense of Imma Pueyo's work: what interests her is painting, the pleasure of painting, although we can't ignore that the colors we use are the evocation of our close environment, the ones that are seen by who looks and from the place he is looking; from her own study. They are the ranges of blues, blacks, sienas, greens, violettes, beixs, cadmis, coldish ranges; perhaps the will to increase distance. They are colors that the artists, in order to match them with her sensivity, have to build in the palette and constitute by this her reality. One reality that has to be also poetic, which says that the world of my environment is not as bad as it seems, but, in the end, is warm, full of life and passion. My reality, the one that makes me paint; even when everything must be redone, like what we see and it is shown to us, but I'm who sees it and to me to whom is presented.
Imma Pueyo - like Cezanne - looks the first plains of the hills, hereby getting at the beginning of a work a moat that then deploys and enriches; the eye and the brush start one march where everything becomes retained color, rich and hued, until it dilutes towards the infinity. Unlike Cezanne, nevertheless, Imma Pueyo knows that while the painting intention is kept, everything can be done and it is possible to construct with whatever is needed. Because the reality is not the athmospherical, it is the one that comes from the wit. Collage allows for the fiction to be more intesting that the actual reality; the monotony of living and seeing is an extraordinary exercise that shows what one wants and not what is offered: is painting. Her visions, from the glance, are joy that doesn't desire anything else.
One exhibition with a personal vision of the sea, way of all dreams
Carme Guasch, Wednesday, 4th May 1994
Imma Pueyo exhibits - with Francesc Santjust - in Figueres for the first time her pictorical work in "La Caixa" at Pi i Maragall street. I'm not an Art Critic and, therefore, I don't have from her painting much more than a personal opinion; I believe and trust that one rigorous and more prepared evaluation - the one by my friend Narcís Pijoan - will be done of this exhibition, but I can't stay without saying 4 words, at least, about Imma.
I met her many years ago, when we were moved to Terrassa and we concurred as teachers in the Vedruna School; she, naturally, teaching History of Art. Even with the age and temperament differences - she, very reserved, reflexive, a little bit cynical - we connected quickly. Often I've been witness - sometimes through the wall dividing our class rooms - of her lessons, explained always with a soft tone of voice, without a hurry, far from rhetoric and emphasis, close to the confidence and thoroughness; I used to tell her, in part joking, in part seriously, that whenever I would got retired, I would have liked to assist to her classes as a listener.
Soon we established a good friendship, which was extended to our husbands; his was neurosurgeon and, unfortunately, this fact added another reason to get us closer. Who could possibly tell us that my ill husband would had to put his life on the hands of him and that, both of them, with a short time difference, would left us forever. Imma, after the collapse, continued giving her classes, like myself, possibly hoping, as well, that the work of teaching would be the wall that would hide, during a few hours a day, the huge emptiness.
But inside the Art teacher there was also an artist and in the action of painting she found, yet, another resource to save herself. She had been pupil of Martinez Lozano - anyone that knows him will be able to detect it - and this feature gives her some kind of presentation letter for the first contact with the public in Figueres. Truly, the ships presented by Imma Pueyo remember - saving personal differences - those Llançà landscapes from the Terrassa's painter that have left a very important memory not only in many walls in many Figueres homes, but also in the Watercolor Llançà Museum.
The sea that Imma paints, however, with a range of blues that goes from the thickest to the coldest, almost metallic, would be a "painted" sea, an static sea and even unreal if it would haven't been humanized with the shapes of the ships - those ships that result obselete in the current technological context - that confers lines and volums that are there integrated and that makes it closer, more quotidian, even with the undeniable content of the dream and/or scape that the set hides. To this Imma Pueyo's "marines" (typical painting of the sea and boats), one could apply Josep Carner's verse: La mar és ampla i el rem és fidel (The sea is wide and the scull is loyal).
IMMA PUEYO
Casa de Cultura de Sant Cugat del Vallès
March-April 2007
We are so immersed in the everyday urban environment, that often we become insensitive in front of her beauty, either understood throughout the crowd, or by the details of their small fragments. And even when the person, walking down a city street, feel inside the impact of the esthetical emotion, this is a momentary and short impression that the cinematics of the travel fastly replace for other new impressions, and the original get blurred inside the collection of received feelings.
Besides, nevertheless, a leftover of small feelings is formed in hidden places of our memory, and inside this leftover images interact unconsciously mixing and powering those details that have shocked us most, creating from them new apparences that belong to the close discernment of the reality, with no need to become and exact copy of the correspondant phisical exteriority. It is in this preaches and strictly personal sources where the artist extracts his aesthetical visions, and after the pictorical technique helps to translate and realize in the artifice of a permanent representation. It is not a matter of documenting enumeratively all the parts that conform the citizen materiality, because there are existing technologies to do this, but much more to express what hits the distant feeling and to show it to the others, looking for the difficult balance between visual pleasure and the suggestion that invites to reflection.
Imma Pueyo's exhibition is intimately linked to the landscapes of her immediate experiences, that she sinthetises and conceptualices to advances towards generical especulations, transforming the small local anecdote in a pretext to show her implication and belonging to a more global phenomenon. If some works still contain specific identifiable referents to the spectator that shares them, is only to create common complicities, helping the background comprehension of the intellectual underlying intent, insinuated in form of shapes and colors. Thus, in the first part of the exhibition, works still show their rooting circumscribed in her place of living, Sant Cugat, some very clearly, because they represent fundamental spaces like the Octavià square, always seen from an inusual point of view, the belfry roof, and others with help, like study neighbourhood inventory, where buildings and roads have overimpressed integrated posters (Sabadell, Sant Domènec, can Mates, etc) to avoid any confusion to the unexperienced crowd to high height views. It is this elevation from the watchtower of the study, the one that dominates the surrounding roofs, the one that gives unusual glances to pipes and party walls that she will use as delimiting racks of a theatral background in which the city enlarges itself cloudly towards the horizon. And the iron railing of this terrace are the ones that, by themselves or as a projected shadow, help to create ambiguity between the spectator and the painting plain.
The worry for the excessiveness of the town realized city is more clearly touchable in thw work that is presented in first term in the main santcugatenc agora, and back to them buildings are multiplicated incommensurables, occupying all the canvas space, becoming, at the same time, metaphore of the anguish provocated by the continued urbanistical growth, to fast to be assimilated, and the sensation of feeling outsider in own identity landscapes.
In the second part, the remain of previous contemplation estimulates to jump to the pure notion world, where the contours and the disposition does not answer to the presential objectivities, but simply to imaginary models that show the strong mental content that exists in every one of them. We are not longer in front of a street, or in front of a definite town either, but in front of an aggregtion of elements that, added alltogether, give us the subjective notion of the author, the translation of her thoughts in plastic images with a big format beauty. This game is also incorporated in the unavoidable time advance. The cloudscapes are not a unity, but they are violently divided by a white light lightning or a subtle smoke column or they are even fragmented in parts that suggest different luminical intensity and coloration depending on the time of the day. The conceptual synthesis becomes more intense, refined and poetic in the two Cerdanya landscapes, that, far from the aesthetical joy, require a bigger comprehension effort from the spectator.
The catalog has an introduction from the scholar and critic Arnau Puig, who synthesizes with the sentence "To build from the glance" and where he underlines that the artist reality is no the athmospherical one, but the one that comes from the wit and that allows for the created function to become more interesting. It is important to remark the elegancy and simplicity of the performance in the room, done by Gestió Cultural SA. A forced perspective painted in the floor creating an optical illusion of a gap in form of ramp, that converged with the biggest work in the room, protected by a railing.
It's Monday. I go for a walk around the village to see the artistic panorama and I stop by the Casa de Cultura. I enter in the Exhibit Hall and begin the lonely and quiet visit to Imma Pueyo exhibition. Visions Urbanes (Urban Vision). The first look (I always follow the established order) goes to the work "City", a vision of Sant Cugat from the belfry of the Monastery, a city lost in the distance. I step to the left and in front of me behold "Poble i Poblat", a longed recreation of small towns where fresh air and the sunset glows, that still makes them more endearing. But even more intimate are the grounds of the old houses in "Ciutats", the name of the old streets where one walks and rethinks to what degree the order of things changes, and so do people and the same houses. The melancholical view of urban reality has evolved in the work "Poblament", innovative in the aesthetics of art that I dare not qualify. From the crowded and narrow winding streets we arrive at the "Plaza", deserted, empty, gray ... Lined houses are warm and people, as before, are available, while, at home one can hear the table talk and the sound of someone cleaning the dishes in the sink. And under the house, in the "parking space city", sleeping cars, metallic vision of space occupied by the motor car junk. Another "Punt de Vista" (Point of View) from the roof to discover new corners and changing places: the city is alive, it moves as the old neighborhood remains stopped. And above the pavement and at the base of "Barana" (Railing) privileged focus invites me to deeper reflections to the charm. In "PV-Blau" the building hides the mountains, fulfilling the quote "the tree that obscures the forest", in ordered way, far. In "Urbs" I see the growth of the city's Metropolitan Plan work some say, or as others would say, "This is unstoppable." Further but as if they were a city "Xemeneies" presents a constant throughout history. They are an extension of the chimneys, the site where fairy tales witches enter and leave when tales are told next to the fireside. And finally, a walk through a "Landscape d'estiu" to smell the thousand scents, breathe fresh air and enjoy the calm purification. This is the journey that the artist often does through her imaginary and close world. The great challenge of emerging artists is to represent ideas rather than objects. Look at the exhibition with this idea.
Reviews
Interview at Pinzellades d'Estiu show
CugatTV
To build from the glance
Arnau Puig
Cezanne had it very clear: it could only be the subject of mental speculation and painting what was presented to the eyes; to get it, he walked and suddenly stopped in front of something when its chromatic structure was not very clear to him. He did know very well how the forms were, he was taught about that at school. But how they looked like, was another matter, his fellow Impressionists had told him that there were no forms but colors, luminous vibrations modified at every instant. In any case if any color was permanent, it kept itself over a powerful moment, and this fact was only possible through an artificial exercise called painting. As he thought - he had been taught in primary school and nobody denied it in the school of fine arts - things actually existed and they were not momentary impressions, so he decided to devote himself to painting to demonstrate that what he had learned was actually true. The realities are the colors used by the artist to paint. If somebody approaches to a strong and autonomous object, when the object is taken, the gesture that traps it alters the thing, not because of the shadow, but for the interference of colorful entities. The artists converts everything that is on the environment into himself, his existence. What surrounds us has the properties we attribute to.
This is what Imma Pueyo says and paints: from my study and my study is myself in my projetion towards my environment, I realize that an alife reality exists, that grows, changes of color, softens, disappears, transforms, modifies, moves; depending if I look left or right, it breaks or thickens, or it gets harder with a single insistent and impenetrable color; but then this mass immures and becomes monochromatic: the proximity removes the hues to offer only colors.
With this chromatic reality that we constantly touch, maybe it's worth to ask to ourselves whether painting is a matter of lights or colors. If things are what we see, when we paint there are only colors around us; to paint is to create colors, to mount colors according to our desire or to our needs. No worries about an hyphotetical hue or a local color; the color that corresponds is the one the balances our sensitivity.
And this is the sense of Imma Pueyo's work: what interests her is painting, the pleasure of painting, although we can't ignore that the colors we use are the evocation of our close environment, the ones that are seen by who looks and from the place he is looking; from her own study. They are the ranges of blues, blacks, sienas, greens, violettes, beixs, cadmis, coldish ranges; perhaps the will to increase distance. They are colors that the artists, in order to match them with her sensivity, have to build in the palette and constitute by this her reality. One reality that has to be also poetic, which says that the world of my environment is not as bad as it seems, but, in the end, is warm, full of life and passion. My reality, the one that makes me paint; even when everything must be redone, like what we see and it is shown to us, but I'm who sees it and to me to whom is presented.
Imma Pueyo - like Cezanne - looks the first plains of the hills, hereby getting at the beginning of a work a moat that then deploys and enriches; the eye and the brush start one march where everything becomes retained color, rich and hued, until it dilutes towards the infinity. Unlike Cezanne, nevertheless, Imma Pueyo knows that while the painting intention is kept, everything can be done and it is possible to construct with whatever is needed. Because the reality is not the athmospherical, it is the one that comes from the wit. Collage allows for the fiction to be more intesting that the actual reality; the monotony of living and seeing is an extraordinary exercise that shows what one wants and not what is offered: is painting. Her visions, from the glance, are joy that doesn't desire anything else.
Back to topOne exhibition with a personal vision of the sea, way of all dreams
Carme Guasch, Wednesday, 4th May 1994
Imma Pueyo exhibits - with Francesc Santjust - in Figueres for the first time her pictorical work in "La Caixa" at Pi i Maragall street. I'm not an Art Critic and, therefore, I don't have from her painting much more than a personal opinion; I believe and trust that one rigorous and more prepared evaluation - the one by my friend Narcís Pijoan - will be done of this exhibition, but I can't stay without saying 4 words, at least, about Imma.
I met her many years ago, when we were moved to Terrassa and we concurred as teachers in the Vedruna School; she, naturally, teaching History of Art. Even with the age and temperament differences - she, very reserved, reflexive, a little bit cynical - we connected quickly. Often I've been witness - sometimes through the wall dividing our class rooms - of her lessons, explained always with a soft tone of voice, without a hurry, far from rhetoric and emphasis, close to the confidence and thoroughness; I used to tell her, in part joking, in part seriously, that whenever I would got retired, I would have liked to assist to her classes as a listener.
Soon we established a good friendship, which was extended to our husbands; his was neurosurgeon and, unfortunately, this fact added another reason to get us closer. Who could possibly tell us that my ill husband would had to put his life on the hands of him and that, both of them, with a short time difference, would left us forever. Imma, after the collapse, continued giving her classes, like myself, possibly hoping, as well, that the work of teaching would be the wall that would hide, during a few hours a day, the huge emptiness.
But inside the Art teacher there was also an artist and in the action of painting she found, yet, another resource to save herself. She had been pupil of Martinez Lozano - anyone that knows him will be able to detect it - and this feature gives her some kind of presentation letter for the first contact with the public in Figueres. Truly, the ships presented by Imma Pueyo remember - saving personal differences - those Llançà landscapes from the Terrassa's painter that have left a very important memory not only in many walls in many Figueres homes, but also in the Watercolor Llançà Museum.
The sea that Imma paints, however, with a range of blues that goes from the thickest to the coldest, almost metallic, would be a "painted" sea, an static sea and even unreal if it would haven't been humanized with the shapes of the ships - those ships that result obselete in the current technological context - that confers lines and volums that are there integrated and that makes it closer, more quotidian, even with the undeniable content of the dream and/or scape that the set hides. To this Imma Pueyo's "marines" (typical painting of the sea and boats), one could apply Josep Carner's verse: La mar és ampla i el rem és fidel (The sea is wide and the scull is loyal).
Carme Guasch, writer
Back to topVisions Urbanes
Pere Gibert i Carreres
IMMA PUEYO
Casa de Cultura de Sant Cugat del Vallès
March-April 2007
We are so immersed in the everyday urban environment, that often we become insensitive in front of her beauty, either understood throughout the crowd, or by the details of their small fragments. And even when the person, walking down a city street, feel inside the impact of the esthetical emotion, this is a momentary and short impression that the cinematics of the travel fastly replace for other new impressions, and the original get blurred inside the collection of received feelings. Besides, nevertheless, a leftover of small feelings is formed in hidden places of our memory, and inside this leftover images interact unconsciously mixing and powering those details that have shocked us most, creating from them new apparences that belong to the close discernment of the reality, with no need to become and exact copy of the correspondant phisical exteriority. It is in this preaches and strictly personal sources where the artist extracts his aesthetical visions, and after the pictorical technique helps to translate and realize in the artifice of a permanent representation. It is not a matter of documenting enumeratively all the parts that conform the citizen materiality, because there are existing technologies to do this, but much more to express what hits the distant feeling and to show it to the others, looking for the difficult balance between visual pleasure and the suggestion that invites to reflection.
Imma Pueyo's exhibition is intimately linked to the landscapes of her immediate experiences, that she sinthetises and conceptualices to advances towards generical especulations, transforming the small local anecdote in a pretext to show her implication and belonging to a more global phenomenon. If some works still contain specific identifiable referents to the spectator that shares them, is only to create common complicities, helping the background comprehension of the intellectual underlying intent, insinuated in form of shapes and colors. Thus, in the first part of the exhibition, works still show their rooting circumscribed in her place of living, Sant Cugat, some very clearly, because they represent fundamental spaces like the Octavià square, always seen from an inusual point of view, the belfry roof, and others with help, like study neighbourhood inventory, where buildings and roads have overimpressed integrated posters (Sabadell, Sant Domènec, can Mates, etc) to avoid any confusion to the unexperienced crowd to high height views. It is this elevation from the watchtower of the study, the one that dominates the surrounding roofs, the one that gives unusual glances to pipes and party walls that she will use as delimiting racks of a theatral background in which the city enlarges itself cloudly towards the horizon. And the iron railing of this terrace are the ones that, by themselves or as a projected shadow, help to create ambiguity between the spectator and the painting plain.
The worry for the excessiveness of the town realized city is more clearly touchable in thw work that is presented in first term in the main santcugatenc agora, and back to them buildings are multiplicated incommensurables, occupying all the canvas space, becoming, at the same time, metaphore of the anguish provocated by the continued urbanistical growth, to fast to be assimilated, and the sensation of feeling outsider in own identity landscapes.
In the second part, the remain of previous contemplation estimulates to jump to the pure notion world, where the contours and the disposition does not answer to the presential objectivities, but simply to imaginary models that show the strong mental content that exists in every one of them. We are not longer in front of a street, or in front of a definite town either, but in front of an aggregtion of elements that, added alltogether, give us the subjective notion of the author, the translation of her thoughts in plastic images with a big format beauty. This game is also incorporated in the unavoidable time advance. The cloudscapes are not a unity, but they are violently divided by a white light lightning or a subtle smoke column or they are even fragmented in parts that suggest different luminical intensity and coloration depending on the time of the day. The conceptual synthesis becomes more intense, refined and poetic in the two Cerdanya landscapes, that, far from the aesthetical joy, require a bigger comprehension effort from the spectator.
The catalog has an introduction from the scholar and critic Arnau Puig, who synthesizes with the sentence "To build from the glance" and where he underlines that the artist reality is no the athmospherical one, but the one that comes from the wit and that allows for the created function to become more interesting. It is important to remark the elegancy and simplicity of the performance in the room, done by Gestió Cultural SA. A forced perspective painted in the floor creating an optical illusion of a gap in form of ramp, that converged with the biggest work in the room, protected by a railing.
Pere Gibert i Carreres
Back to topBehind the railing
Rogeli Pedró
It's Monday. I go for a walk around the village to see the artistic panorama and I stop by the Casa de Cultura. I enter in the Exhibit Hall and begin the lonely and quiet visit to Imma Pueyo exhibition. Visions Urbanes (Urban Vision). The first look (I always follow the established order) goes to the work "City", a vision of Sant Cugat from the belfry of the Monastery, a city lost in the distance. I step to the left and in front of me behold "Poble i Poblat", a longed recreation of small towns where fresh air and the sunset glows, that still makes them more endearing. But even more intimate are the grounds of the old houses in "Ciutats", the name of the old streets where one walks and rethinks to what degree the order of things changes, and so do people and the same houses. The melancholical view of urban reality has evolved in the work "Poblament", innovative in the aesthetics of art that I dare not qualify. From the crowded and narrow winding streets we arrive at the "Plaza", deserted, empty, gray ... Lined houses are warm and people, as before, are available, while, at home one can hear the table talk and the sound of someone cleaning the dishes in the sink. And under the house, in the "parking space city", sleeping cars, metallic vision of space occupied by the motor car junk. Another "Punt de Vista" (Point of View) from the roof to discover new corners and changing places: the city is alive, it moves as the old neighborhood remains stopped. And above the pavement and at the base of "Barana" (Railing) privileged focus invites me to deeper reflections to the charm. In "PV-Blau" the building hides the mountains, fulfilling the quote "the tree that obscures the forest", in ordered way, far. In "Urbs" I see the growth of the city's Metropolitan Plan work some say, or as others would say, "This is unstoppable." Further but as if they were a city "Xemeneies" presents a constant throughout history. They are an extension of the chimneys, the site where fairy tales witches enter and leave when tales are told next to the fireside. And finally, a walk through a "Landscape d'estiu" to smell the thousand scents, breathe fresh air and enjoy the calm purification. This is the journey that the artist often does through her imaginary and close world. The great challenge of emerging artists is to represent ideas rather than objects. Look at the exhibition with this idea.
Rogeli Pedró, TOT Sant Cugat, April 2007
Back to top