Bodies. (Through imagination)

Rita Martorell presents us with a new submission of her artistic creation in the exhibition Bodies, which represents a maturity of a theme she has been exploring for some time now. After showing her good craftsmanship and her technique in the field of portraits, the young painter from Olot, a land of volcanoes, now installed in a permanent trip around the world which does not make her give up either her identity or her roots, shows us how she has managed to relinquish her art to draw naked bodies which also shows her ability to undress, distil, polish and perfect her art (removing herself from perfection and accentuating freedom in her creation) in a long trip towards what is essential, towards something that embodies the history and the stories of all times.

Bodies. Explicit bodies and implicit bodies. Contention and passion. What she draws and what she leaves up to the viewer’s imagination. Rita Martorell is culminating her creative maturity with a style that brings together the best of centuries of a bourgeois look at life: what is most explicit is not always what is most beautiful or most suggestive. Thus, Rita Martorell invites us to complete and prolong the story that each of her works entails. The story and the history that she knows perfectly well but which she knows, as those good at art do, is best left to the free will of the viewer’s imagination. An imagination which is also helped a great deal by the colours she uses. As the bodies are never neutral in their gestures or colourless in their states of mind and passion and as their colour changes over time, the author has preferred to opt for the thick lines of black charcoal and backgrounds in a tonality that is not very invasive in the wings of one’s imagination. The ochres, the soft greens… the colours that are the anteroom of the imagination which each person wants to install in a story that can be romantic, erotic, heroic, warrior-like, sensual or lordly.

Rita Martorell’s Bodies could well illustrate one of Sándor Márai’s novels set in Europe between the wars, but which could also connote Tokyo Blues by Haruki Murakami. Someone wrote that we are responsible for the features of our face after the age of thirty. Rita Martorell’s Bodies are far-removed from their precise stage of yesterday so that each individual can complete the faces of their bodies reading the drawings as if they were reading a book, with their eyes wide open and tightly closed at the same time.

Enjoy this new link in Rita Martorell’s production. She works in a constant way and with an indispensable touch of obstinacy typical of anyone who wants to do great things in life. However, at the same time, with an aura of mystery, lack of definition and ambiguity through a powerful and enigmatic constant transit through her world, which is the entire world (and which has odours of laughter) and which provides us with such good works, such good material for an invitation to the imagination. Never stop imagining! You would be dead. Rita Martorell never stops imagining!

Jordi Xuclà

Member of Parliament
Spokesman for the Committee of Foreign Affairs