Modest Almirall

Juan Bufill · La Vanguardia · 30 June 2000

The protagonists of Modest Almirall’s paintings (Ca N’Aguilera, Barcelona, 1959) are solitary characters, who appear as diminutive figures in grand architectural spaces, archetypal, geometrical, and otherwise depopulated. The plaza, the abyss, the horizon, the tower or the staircase are, apart from space and colour, the settings for these paintings. However, his aim is not to rework the cliché of the smallness of humanity when confronted with the infinite universe. Here physical enormity is not confused with true greatness, and it is his human figures that are the most important element and the most elaborately worked – using miniaturist techniques – in these paintings.