SANT JULIÀ DE CERDANYOLA, 1948 – LA POBLA DE LILLET, 2023 Casas Anfruns

In his paintings, Casas Anfruns talks about Barcelona and Gaudí but also dedicates space to the main European cities.

BIOGRAPHY

Formed in design, architecture and fine arts, he began pictorially with the painter Rafael de Soto. In 1968 he settled in Ibiza, where he worked wooden sculpture and drawing on paper. In 1978 he lived in Paris, where the gray and rainy environment of the city marked an important point in his artistic career: he found the path of his current painting, the one that shows rain and fog surrounding buildings and different elements of street furniture.

During the 80’s he made innumerable exhibitions in the main cities of our country and abroad and won important awards and distinctions. From 1990 he returned almost exclusively to the urban theme that had already begun during his Parisian period. Cities such as Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Venice, Girona or London are personally reflected in his work. However, it was in 1992 that marked a before and after in his career: the Olympic Games in Barcelona lead to deepen in the Catalan capital and especially in the work of Gaudí, which is present in all exhibitions held since then until the present. We find his works in collections from France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Monaco, Great Britain, USA, Holland, Japan, New Zealand.

IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER

by Teresa Casas

With this exhibition and the second edition of the book we want to pay homage to the life and work of Casas Anfruns, an ode to the attentive gaze and the transforming power of Art. On each page there is more than a painting, there are brushstrokes of love and memories that will never be erased. We can perceive the beauty and the gaze of Casas Anfruns, a gaze that we want to be with us always.His art was his voice, a voice that spoke through colors and meticulous details. In each canvas he left a part of his soul, a visual narrative that transcends time and space.in the book, divided into five chapters according to theme, we will discover his work. Impregnated with a unique sensitivity, it transports us to the rainy streets of Barcelona and above all to Gaudí’s creative universe, with a style that combines realism and the magic of impressionism

His paintings show Gaudí’s themes, organic forms and architectural details with rigorous precision. La Pedrera, Casa Batlló, the brittle colorist of Park Güell or the sculptures that Subirachs made in the Sagrada Familia are some of his inspirational motifs. To these more realistic works are added others in which the diffused light of the rain is the protagonist, in them the colors fade and blend, creating a magical and melancholic atmosphere.

This book is a prologue to his eternal presence in our lives. With each page turned, her legacy lives on, inspiring us to see the world through her eyes. A tribute to his passion, to his love of painting and to the beauty he so longed for.

 

SUCCESSFUL GAUDINIAN VISION OF ANFRUNS HOUSES

by Josep M. Cadena

The creativity of Antoni Gaudí, a supply expressed in architectural realizations, both religious and civil, which are a must-see for tourists, goes beyond its formidable buildings, as the genius of Reus was a creative who extended to all kinds of objects and accessories his ability to project both aesthetic and spiritual. At the same time, the influence of the architect of the Sagrada Familia, Casa Milà, Casa Batlló, Casa Vicens and Park Güell, to name some of the works represented pictorially in this exhibition entitled Barcelona and Gaudí, did not die with the disappearance architect’s physics, but has survived among us and has spread to more and more countries and cultures.

Lorenzo Casas Anfruns (Barcelona, ​​1958), which inaugurated the new artistic season in the Rusiñol theater in Sant Cugat, has been following for decades the strong and innovative footprint of the great master of Reus. And just as in January 2009 and February 2013 I was very pleased to accompany him with words of praise, now I do it again to say that the painter, with his art, investigates, finds and highlights, in a succinct synthesis , the most essential features of Gaudí’s language. And he does so by contributing his vision of a genuine artist, so that the fabrics benefit from an enriching sum, just as the different sediments that transport the currents of the rivers create fertile deltas.

Casas Anfruns claims that the right addition is a generator of value, since it rightly understands that human beings, a social animal par excellence, need their peers to achieve their goals and fully realize them. That is why the canvases collect, along with the constructions of Antoni Gaudí, the artistic creations of other authors, and the result is reveals superior to the individual parts that make it up. Gaudí’s works are World Heritage by themselves, but they win when they have adequate company. Thus, La Pedrera dialogues perfectly with Pere Falqués’s lampposts, Casa Batlló can not be conceived without the Casa Amatller on one side, the Park Güell square requires the city at its feet, the Hotel Vela and the monument to Colom they help the towers of the Sagrada Familia to define the skyline of Barcelona, ​​and the sculptures of Josep Maria Subirachs on the facade of the Passion of the expiatory temple are the replica of the Gaudí sculptural set of the Nativity façade.

In his paintings, Casas Anfruns speaks of Barcelona and Gaudí, of a city dominated by the noise and haste in the middle of which rises a temple dedicated to faith, of houses commissioned by serious bourgeois that are a burst of fantasy, of an artistic heritage of the past that spiritually feeds the present, and all these elements and others combine magnificently like the pieces of a mosaic of the genius of Reus.