Gerard Castellvi Gasco

Gerard Castellví's painting is built slowly, like a "visual catalogue of elements gathered over years of contemplative observation", in the words of his Spanish gallery. He paints in oil on canvas deserted hills, mountainsides, figures that merge into the landscape until they are lost in it. His manner keeps the structure of the academic drawing learned in Florence, but it tends towards synthesis: forms are simplified, colour takes precedence over detail, and the whole slides towards a progressive abstraction without ever breaking the link with the figure. Landscape serves him as a field of emotional exploration, a place where inner and outer meet. He has told this evolution himself. "I am a figurative artist, I studied realism, and I have always worked with the human figure because it fascinates me," he explained to the Diari de Tarragona in 2020, adding that "the human figure remains a very marked and very organised structure, but there came a moment when I felt the need to break with all that". The curator Javier Ruiz, who wrote the text for his 2024 solo exhibition, taken up by Galerie Calderone, describes his work as "a kind of pictorial diary" and likens his practice to walking alone: "Walking in solitude is like painting." Format is an expressive variable for him: the small canvases capture quick impressions of the landscapes around his home town, while the large ones, almost life-size, make room for his inner life. In an accelerated world, he claims a painting of silence and reconnection, "where the questions matter more than the answers".

Gerard Castellví Gascó was born in 1986 in Montblanc, in the province of Tarragona, Catalonia. He first trained in applied drawing: in 2008 he earned a diploma in graphic design at EADT, the Tarragona art school. He then studied fine arts at the University of Barcelona, graduating in 2012, before leaving for Italy. At the Florence Academy of Art he completed the full painting and drawing programme in 2015; there he received a merit scholarship and, twice, in 2013 and 2014, the prize for the best drawing of his year. During these Florentine years he frequented the studios of Antonio López, Golucho, Sangram Majumdar, Max Ginsburg and Stuart Shils. Two residencies extended this training: Galerie Schloß Wiespach, near Salzburg, in 2015, then the ICCI Art Valley – TIAC residency in Shanghai in 2018. Three times a finalist in the Figurativas competition of the Fundació de les Arts i els Artistes (2015, 2017, 2019), he has seen his works enter the collections of MEAM, the European Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona, and the Reial Acadèmia Catalana de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi, as well as those of the town of Montblanc, the Port of Tarragona and Jiao Tong University in Shanghai. He has exhibited in Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and China. Gerard Castellví lives and works in Barcelona, where he directs the painting and drawing programme of the Barcelona Academy of Art. He is represented in Spain by the Victor Lope Contemporáneo gallery.