BARCELONA, 1940-2024 Andreu Fresquet

As a painter he cultivates a critical realism in which diffuse figures appear, usually on dark backgrounds.

BIOGRAPHY

He studied in Barcelona, ​​at Palco (1955-62) and at the Conservatory of the Arts of the Book. He has maintained a constant concern for the graphic arts.

Jordi Andreu Fresquet is one of the recognized names in contemporary Catalan painting and has works distributed in museums in Italy, Venezuela or California and also here in our country, such as the Macba. A style of painting that recalls the work of Francis Bacon. His creations, however, have not only been limited to paintings, but have also taken to the streets. Fresquet has collaborated with the garrisons of Fiesta Mayor in the street of Joan Blanques and the square of Rovira i Trias, which was in the top positions with the Sueños design.

THE STIMULATING DYNAMISM OF ANDREU FRESQUET

by Josep M. Cadena

In 1987 -and sorry to start referring to such a distant date, but is that the creative coherence of the artist that I will now talk about justifies- I dedicated a text to Andreu Fresquet, who now exhibits in the Rusiñol Gallery and with his ardent and active work closes the present pictorial season of the gallery. It was a writing that made up a little book, very well arranged and complete within its brevity, belonging to the Contemporary Spanish Art collection – edited by Fernando Fernán Gómez, son of the widely known actor -, which has a long and remarkable career Promoting importance of the then new plastic values ​​to whom it was dedicated. In her they appeared, as far as Catalan painters, Joaquim Viola, Joaquim Budesca and Jordi Andreu Fresquet -Andreu is his first last name, although sometimes is confused by a name-, born in Badalona in 1940, and that already had an ample trajectory expository, because he had begun to show his work from 1959 -movent very intensely through the halls especially since 1962, when he finished his artistic studies in La Llotja-.

This constant movement of which I speak is not only a skill, but a way to make congenital – in its genes there is a kinship with the great family of circus artists Rivel, from which the world famous Charlie Rivel came out – that drives Andreu Fresquet make his painting fully active. Therefore, in that old text, I began by saying that the dynamics in color is the essential feature in the painting of Jordi Andreu Fresquet. And now, before this exhibition that he does with his most recent work, we find ourselves with the pleasant surprise that he maintains, with more intensity in the contents, those expressive forms that have always attracted us -bodegons and compositions of fruits, teapots and cups of white porcelain, dance movements, windows – and that, in short, are a great desire for freedom.

Because the man, the citizen who structures the artist who is Andreu Fresquet, has always defended freedom. He began to do it in his first pictures, when it was impossible to express it openly due to the environmental conditions in which we found ourselves, and it continues along the same lines, despite the fact that we have recovered many of the collective rights that correspond to us. And the painter believes in his art and gives himself as an essential way of salvation that, if we know how to go forward, will free us from the problems that surround us. Its dynamism is, therefore, stimulating, and it is necessary that we congratulate ourselves for what positively contributes to us.