Exhibitions
The hidden cosmos of Cuixart in Palafrugell
Nature, memory and matter in a contemporary look at the interior landscape at the Museo del Suro.
Palafrugell hosts the first event of the commemoration of the Cuixart Centenary with an exhibition that can be visited from May 9 to July 26, and that proposes a deep immersion in the symbolic and poetic language of Modest Cuixart's work. The exhibition brings together around thirty pieces that, beyond their formal diversity, share the same drive: the desire to explore nature as an expanded reality, loaded with memory, imagination and mystery.
Curated by the doctor in Art History Raquel Medina Vargas, the exhibition at the Museu del Suro articulates a story that transcends simple chronology to delve into the deepest cores of Cuixart's thought. The cosmos and nature appear not as represented motifs, but as mental and emotional structures that underpin his entire artistic production. In this sense, the works on display function as gateways to a universe where reality dissolves and is constantly recomposed through signs, organic forms and floating geometries.
The compositions presented—in which bulbs, leaves, graphics and geometric elements float—reveal an intensely symbolic imaginary, where abstraction and figuration coexist without hierarchies, and where realism is deliberately contaminated with surrealist resonances. This tension between apparent worlds and inner worlds is one of the keys to understanding Cuixart's career, especially in his ability to turn painting into a space of revelation rather than representation.
The exhibition also allows us to trace the echoes of his early stages, prior to his association with Dau al Set, as well as the period of informalist experimentation developed in Paris and Lyon. Those years, marked by an intense research into the subject and its expressiveness, placed Cuixart on an international circuit of recognition, culminating in milestones such as his distinction at the São Paulo Biennial in 1959. In these early works, a special sensitivity towards the ancestral and mythical is already perceived, as if painting were an instrument for listening to the deep vibrations of the cosmos.
However, it is in his maturity, especially from the late eighties onwards, that his work experiences a new inflection. After having explored intense figurative registers during his time in Palafrugell, Cuixart begins a process of reinvention that leads him towards a formal simplification and greater expressive concentration. In this return to essential matter, personal memory acquires a fundamental role: memories of adolescence, when he accompanied his pharmacist uncle to collect herbs and roots in the forest, become a symbolic territory that reconfigures his relationship with nature.
This intimate contact with the earth—with its rhythms, textures, and smells—reappears in his work of the 1990s as a latent force that radically transforms the concept of landscape. It is no longer an external representation of the natural world, but an immersion in its deepest and most primal dimension. Painting thus becomes a space for introspection and a return to an almost archetypal experience of nature.
The result is a sober and refined artistic language, but at the same time loaded with symbolic intensity. A visual writing that connects with the most experimental stages of his career, and that at the same time opens up new avenues of contemporary reading on the relationship between art, memory and nature.
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