Paintings

A short series of works from 2000 to 2003 titled NP, for New Painting. It carries the elements that will settle, one year later, into the language of Face FS.

The Face FS (floating soul) series is the artist’s most emblematic work to date. It begins with a first work in 2004, Face FS4 The Monk.

The series coincides with a moment of synthesis, when recurring and essential elements give rise to an obviousness: the evidence of a coherent pictorial language, the result of years of research combined with the artist’s own interests.

Face FS highlights the human element at a time when technology is becoming omnipresent, and has the capacity to change, standardise and orchestrate everything. The body of work since 2004 stands as a diagnosis that will challenge viewers, bringing them face to face with their own future: political, psychological, historical, simply human.

From 2011–2012, the exhibitions in the USA transform Face FS. Formats are enlarged, and the pictorial flesh of the faces changes: previously more ethereal and blended, it takes on a more imposing presence. The white space of the canvas — intended as a “white space of light”, a cradle of souls — sometimes becomes a narrative space with a landscape or a secondary scene.

A series of oil-on-canvas works in progress, following the rhythm of the artist’s analyses. Medium to large format. They represent the artist in his studio, facing history and current events, in his relationship with the world and with creation.

In Christophe Avella Bagur’s conception of culture, art is a historical sequence that feeds on the past to envisage the future, in new pictorial forms and grammars. Golgoth’Art v2 is a variation on the same theme, with drawings and gold leaf mounted on canvas. The name refers to Christ’s Golgotha: to be an artist is an election, a gift of oneself for the culture of humanity, and the journey of thought and action is long and testing.

The large-scale Face FS Madonna series — Les Pleureuses is a set of fifty-three works in Indian ink on paper created between 2019 and 2020. The series comprises three sizes: 220 × 300 cm (6), 150 × 110 cm (10), 50 × 70 cm (37).

It was inspired by the rediscovery of Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross in the Prado, Madrid. From close up, the artist saw tears streaming down the faces of the scene’s protagonists, which led to the first three Face FS New Apostles works in oil on canvas, begun in 2014. The desire for a larger body of work gave rise to the Madonna series, which went from Van der Weyden’s religious origins to the profane, depicting contemporary women in their everyday lives.

Final Trilogy Part I — War exhibits an undefined set of small-format oil paintings (40 × 50 cm, or 50 × 60 cm). The format was chosen to paint a single portrait against a landscape or cloudy sky. The palette is intense, deliberately saturated, echoing one of the artist’s pictorial reflections: flesh has symptoms — realism is not limited to rendering skin as it appears, colours are expressive beyond natural light.

The subject is war: a return from the front, the portrait of a soldier back in the rear lines, until the next day when his life will again be on the line. The absurdity of the human condition, but the necessity of states: cannon fodder, whatever the era, is always on the front lines.

War · Zion is an introspective image of a portrait, in thought. A spatial ballet of lines, curves and points of light bursting into fiery sprays. In each work there is an economy of lines whose reading exerts visual tension, in the manner of information about the world that grips us with dread.

These luminous lines could be the image of our connected, stupefied neurons — but they are above all, as the title suggests, the tearing apart of a Middle Eastern sky by a ground-to-air protection system. Final Trilogy War Zion comprises twelve works.