Exhibitions
Assumpció Mateu paints the shadows of the Mediterranean
Les Ombres del Blau turns the Ciutadella de Roses into a space of memory where painting, visual poetry, installation and video art dialogue with more than twenty-five centuries of history.
Blue begins in the landscape and ends in memory. Between these two extremes unfolds Les Ombres del Blau , the new project by Assumpció Mateu that will occupy the Ciutadella de Roses from October 9 to December 20, 2026. Conceived specifically for this space, the exhibition establishes a dialogue between the artist's work and a place crossed by more than twenty-five centuries of history, where the different layers of time become an essential part of the exhibition experience.
Mateu takes blue as a starting point, but not as a simple chromatic resource. In his work, color acquires a physical, emotional and symbolic dimension. Transparencies, glazes, overlays and textures build surfaces that seem to retain fragments of landscape, light and memories. Painting thus becomes a territory where the visible and the intuitive are confused.
Most of the works are large-format and are designed to relate to the architecture and history of the Ciutadella. The tour offers an experience in which the pieces do not simply appear installed within the space, but rather establish a conversation with its stones, its remains and the traces of the different civilizations that have passed through this Mediterranean enclave.
Blue acts as a common thread that connects the external landscape with the artist's internal landscapes. Sea, sky, depth and light appear transformed into pictorial matter, while the layers of paint also evoke the layers of time accumulated in the Ciutadella. In this sense, Les Ombres del Blau is not only an exhibition about the Mediterranean, but a reflection on the way in which places accumulate memory and how art can make it visible.
The proposal also expands the limits of painting. Alongside pictorial works, Mateu incorporates visual poetry, installation and video art, articulating a journey that goes from matter to the moving image. This combination of languages allows us to delve deeper into a conception of the work as a space of experience and not only of contemplation.
The tour culminates with a video art piece that takes us to the contemporary Mediterranean. The sea, which for centuries has been a symbol of exchange, beauty and communication, also appears as a territory of tensions, conflicts, displacements and confrontations. The same maritime space that connects cultures is also the scene of borders, losses and human fractures.
This contemporary dimension introduces a certain shade into Mateu's blue. The beauty of the Mediterranean landscape ceases to be sufficient and gives way to a more complex look, aware of the contradictions that cross this territory. The sea thus becomes memory, but also present; a place of encounter, but also of separation.
The exhibition highlights an artistic career built around nature, landscape, memory and matter. Assumpció Mateu Negre (Girona, 1952) is a visual artist with an extensive career in contemporary art and a practice that has moved through painting, sculpture, photography, installation and graphic work. Her work has been presented internationally and has always maintained a close relationship with the processes of transformation of nature and with the possibilities of matter as a vehicle of memory.
In Les Ombres del Blau , this research finds a particularly powerful interlocutor in the Ciutadella de Roses. The stones and the works establish a relationship of correspondences: some preserve the marks of a material past and others try to capture, through color and matter, what remains in memory when time has already transformed the places.
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