PRUIT, 1942 Benet Sarsanedas

His works, despite the break with the drawing, keep a solid structure.

In the landscapes of Sarsanedas there is a desire to encounter nature, understood as a permanent affirmation of existence.

BIOGRAPHY

He began his training at the Ateneo de Girona. In the sixties, he set up a studio in calle de la Palla in Barcelona and came into contact with the avant-garde artistic environment of this city. He regularly goes to the Artistic Circle of San Lucas, where he perfects his drawing technique, especially the nude. Since 1970 he lives long periods in Paris.

He often visits museums and galleries and paints oils and gouaches on the Seine, the Latin Quarter, Montparnasse … Paris has always been a great source of inspiration; the frequent stays in this city allow him to maintain contact with his artistic and cultural world. In 1978 he took a course in fresco painting at the International School of Mural Painting in Sant Cugat del Vallès. His travels and stays in the Empordà, Castilla, the Maestrazgo, Asturias, the Alpujarras and in England, Italy, Holland, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Russia, America, China, Thailand, Turkey and Morocco, will mark his later work. Since 1974, the year in which he presents his first solo exhibition, he has exhibited constantly both individually and in collective exhibitions, at home and abroad.

CONSTANT WILL OF PROGRESS IN THE LANDSCAPES OF BENET SARSANEDAS

by Josep M. Cadena

In the landscapes of Benet Sarsanedas (Rupit, 1942) there is a desire to meet nature, understood as a permanent affirmation of existence. The works describe the external form of the natural elements while capturing their internal moments of full vital growth. The painter, a live-eye hunter with a patient disposition to better guess the woodcocks when they get off the erratic flight, pours his knowledge of country man into the realization of some paintings that extract from the reality that surrounds us a demand for a better future. A good connoisseur of the earth, who wants to represent in all its magnificence, understands heaven as a luminous aspiration that must be reached not as a goal that once achieved is the end of everything, but as a new beginning in the struggle for The perfection.

Lover of the Catalan geography, he also estimates the European regions, and the present exhibition is the pictorial testimony of a trip that begins in his native town, passes, among other places, by Vilella Baixa, Cap de Creus and Salamanca, and, already outside the peninsula, it reaches the Italian Chioggia and the Norwegian Alesund. The water that twin the earth is very present, almost always next to houses in communion with the environment that often surround a church steeple that points beyond the clouds. In the exhibition, which the artist has titled North-South, the diversity of the two hemispheres presents the common bond of the same human desires that equal us parts and that should be reason for understanding and concord.

Benet Sarsanedas transforms the flame of ideals that burns inside in a palette of colors that creates works that drive towards universality. The author, with a restless spirit, transmits to us his certainties and doubts, and invites us, through paintings that show beauty, to advance in company but in silence along the path of overcoming materiality that leads to the achievement of spirituality.

PERMANENT VITALITY IN THE WORK OF BENET SARSANEDAS

by Josep M. Cadena

The painting of Benet Sarsanedas is aerial. In his paintings, always focused on the representation of tangible beauty, I find the breath of the passing wind, which moves rhythmically the grass of the field and the waters of the sea so that everything is waves; the light breeze that makes the leaves of the trees sound and stimulates the look when we go through the forest and a ray of sun warms our thoughts; and even the wind that, located on top of a peak, allows us to feel risky travelers through the vast interior space yet to be discovered. And although I am not a friend of excursions and I do not know the pleasures of hunting – instead he is a man with light legs and ample knowledge about how the becada flies off – whenever I see his work, be it his Collsacabra or land far away, I think of the pleasures that Nature gives when you caress it with loving eyes and free yourself from it as the representation, within its great spaces, of what is the spirit of existence.

Born in Rupit, charming and charming town, Benet Sarsanedas practiced in his early years the trade of carpenter, which came by family tradition. Then he showed that he was a skilled person with his hands and agile with his mind. He also spent a few years as a seminarian in Vic and opened his mind to culture, which is not so much to know a lot of loose things, but to flirt to think properly about everything that happens around. And as a child he was a rogue, a human virtue-it is virtue and not defect-that has always accompanied him in order to grasp the meaning of matter. This, without the vital force that animates it would be nothing and he, already a painter, for decades knows how to enter it to find a series of dynamic thanks mutants instead.

Very personal in his way of painting, Benet Sarsanedas comes to us all as a fact of our own and very natural, as if we came from within when in reality it comes from outside. That is to say, the artist is he, but he acts in a way that we all feel protagonists of what tells us with the vitality of his forms, seen through the colors. In no case does he want to impress us with the well-worked simplicity with which he tells himself, but immediately makes us his when he awakens our feelings with which he, before, has been experimenting. Personally I think he is leaving, generous and vital as he is, part of himself in every painting he does. A part that does not put size and revive when, as now, we offer in each of the works of this exhibition.