Carles Piqueras presents his latest work at the Castell de Calonge

Since last Saturday, August 8, you can visit the new exhibition by the artist Carles Piqueras (Girona, 1956), You can't play with food. Or are you? , at the Castell de Calonge. The exhibition, which was officially inaugurated on Saturday at 7:00 pm, brought together a large local audience and presents the artist's latest work, which explores the world of gastronomy.

Jordi Soler i Casals, mayor of Calonge and Sant Antoni, was present at the event, and declared that "there are artists who represent reality. There are also those who transform it. And there are those, like Carles Piqueras, who achieve something even more difficult: to awaken in us the desire to look at it again", and added that "the works of this hunchback artist do not demand a quick observation or an immediate response. Quite the opposite. They invite us to pause, to let ourselves be carried away by curiosity and to discover that, often, the extraordinary is hidden in the everyday".

For her part, the doctor in Tourism from the University of Girona, Pilar Giró, explains that "in the works in this exhibition, reality is subtly transformed before our eyes. Piqueras turns the gastronomic universe into a territory of visual and conceptual play. Food ceases to be solely food to become metaphors, absurd associations, poetic artifacts or exercises in visual intelligence. Everyday life is altered with a disconcerting naturalness: an olive can become a watchful eye, mussels experience a metamorphosis of flesh into rock, and oysters, far from offering a gallop of the sea, propose a sweet immersion for the palate."

• Poster by Carles Piqueras created by the Calonge and Sant Antoni City Council, 2026.

For his part, Piqueras explains that "the title of the exhibition is inspired by play, since throughout his childhood he did nothing but play and that for him play is the first and greatest tool that human beings have to learn, since we all learn and play throughout our lives."

And he himself, despite being in his seventies, hopes to continue playing to learn or to continue learning by playing. And he concludes by saying that "we have all heard the phrase 'You can't play with food'. The union of the verbs to eat and to play converge into a third verb, to cook, that is, to create, and they are what define the spirit of this exhibition in a crystal clear way."

Regarding the technique of his paintings, according to Piqueras, "the works on display are made with simple colored pencils, pencils that children use from a very young age, which is the tool they use to create the magnificent drawings they usually make at this age. They are the first and most beloved toy for a good part of their childhood and unfortunately they will soon forget them forever. But I have never forgotten them!".

The exhibition includes productions made from 2000 to 2025, such as Lluïda amanita (2020), Tin of pickled mussels (2019), L'ull de Florenci (2021), Jove cavaller (2022) or Bitxos (2024), or the Yellow-Green-Red Variations (2024), among others.

Regarding the biography of Carles Piqueras, he was accidentally born in Girona in 1956, but he considers himself a son of Sant Feliu de Guíxols, a lifelong ganxón, since this town has inspired him a lot.

He studied Applied Arts at the Massana School in Barcelona and, without dedicating himself professionally to art, he has worked and exhibited throughout his life, cultivating a career marked by the diversity of styles and techniques.

For many years, his work has been especially known for its realistic style and use of colored pencils, a technique not common among professional artists.

Exhibition by Modest Cuixart

In parallel with this exhibition, the exhibition of Modest Cuixart, art collection of the Gamón Medin Foundation (1925-2010), which is an entity created to conserve and disseminate its important contemporary art collection, with pieces by Dau al Set and other important artists such as Manuel Bea, Enrique Brinkmann, Ramon Calsina, Xavier Corberó, Antoni Clavé, Josep Grau-Garriga, Francisco Peinado, etc., was also inaugurated on the same day, on the second floor of the Castell de Calonge.

It should be remembered that the Gamón-Medina Foundation was created by Lluís Gamón Boldobà and M. Esther Medina Peláez with the main objective of preserving an artistic heritage consisting of around 250 works of painting and sculpture. This Foundation has held several exhibitions to show its legacy throughout Catalonia.

According to information from the Calonge City Council organization, this exhibition has been presented as a magnificent selection of unpublished, very colorful works and portraits of women by Cuixart that allows us to get closer to the career of this renowned artist, while also serving to commemorate the year of the celebration of the centenary of the painter's birth.

These two exhibitions are part of the summer cultural program of the Castell de Calonge and can be visited throughout the month of August.