FIG TREE 2018

Works by Jordi Rodríguez-Amat

The artist, in this particular case the painter, walks, the eye always attentive. Everything he sees is analysed with his eyes and then mentally transformed in art forms.

The fig tree is an eminently Mediterranean tree. For days Rodriguez-Amat, passing by a place, saw a fig tree. The fig tree is, moreover, an ancestral primitive tree with extraordinary beauty. One day the artist felt the need to transform the image of the tree into art forms. It was not the colour, but the formal essence of the tree that impressed the artist’s spirit.

To perform the works, the analysis of the forms has been necessary and at the same time to carry out its simplification and stylization.

In the mind of the painter there was the idea of making a series of 9 works in the same spirit. There are two reasons why Rodriguez-Amat has decided this number in advance:

a) The first one is that the Board of Trustees of the Rodríguez-Amat Foundation is made up of 9 members and the artist use to make a present for each of the patrons every year. This time he thought in doing works expressly for this reason.

b) secondly and coincidentally, the number 9 owns all the other simple numbers and it is the sacred number that condenses the spirit and matter. The number 9 contains the number 3 which is the number of the trilogy of the great gods. It also contains the trilogy of the past, present and future in addition to the beginning, the middle and the end. In Christianity we find the Holy Trinity: father, son and holy spirit.

Based on all these arguments, the painter captured 9 images of the fig tree by making a tour of 360 °.

The work process was as follows: once the image of the tree, from each of 9 points of view, has been formed in the mind of the painter, Rodríguez-Amat translated with charcoal and fast strokes, in order to keep the spontaneity out of the forms, the general lines of the tree. Then, with a fat black pencil, he worked the different lines that make up the shapes of the tree very carefully, looking for all to express the essence and the spirit of the form of the fig tree.

These works were created during the month of March and the beginning of April 2018.

Jordi Rodríguez-Amat

All the works have the same size: 56 cm x 76 cm.