Ràfols-Casamada, Albert.
Works of the artist.
Ràfols-Casamada, Albert
Albert Ràfols-Casamada (Barcelona, 1923 - 2009) was a Spanish poet and painter.
He began his artistic career by learning the technique of drawing with his father, the painter Albert Ràfols Cullarés. While still very young, he became acquainted with the work of Picasso, Braque and Miró through publications like \"Gaseta de les Arts\" and \"D'Ací i d'Allá\". During those years he made drawings inspired by cubism and futurism and began to take an interest in the work of Torres-García, which also influenced his literary vocation.
He started studying architecture at the University of Barcelona (1942), parallel to writing poetry and to reading authors and texts that greatly influenced his life, such as Proust, Joyce, the Generation of '27, contemporary Catalan poetry and various theoretical essays on avant-garde movements. He enrolled at the Tàrrega drawing academy (1945), where he met his future wife, painter Maria Girona, with whom he founded the short-lived group \"Els Vuit\" together with other artists.
He also joined the \"Cercle Maillol\", created in 1946 by Charles Collet and Xavier Valls, a platform for the revival of the pre-Civil War avant-garde. During these years, Ràfols-Casamada's works, themes of figures and interiors, show the influence of Cézanne and Fauvism. In 1948 he abandoned his architectural studies to devote himself entirely to painting.
Thanks to a grant from the French government, he travelled to Paris (1950), where he remained until 1954. Despite showing the architectural sense of Cubism, his works at this time were not yet entirely abstract, showing a certain influence of the prevailing realist trend in Paris in the 1950s.
He returned to Barcelona in 1955. From 1958 onwards his style underwent a significant change, partly due to the discovery of the work of painters such as Rotkho, Motherwell and Philip Guston. As a result, his creations from 1959 to 1963 were abstract compositions, which were part of a personal style that coincided with Spain\'s informalist period.
During this time he also began his teaching and giving classes at the Elisava School of Art and Design, where he was appointed director the following year.
He also co-founded the Eina School (1967), an institution which carried out a process of modernization and artistic pedagogy in the context of Barcelona's cultural environment, and in which Ràfols was the director for seventeen years.
In the mid-1960s he took part in the Catalan version of Estampa Popular. After incorporating collage into his work (1963), from the 1970s onwards his work contrasts areas of colour and light strokes in a synthesis of architectural structure and poetic sense. In 1980 he became a member of the Board of Trustees of the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona and was also awarded the National Prize for Plastic Arts. The Generalitat of Catalonia awarded him the Cross of Sant Jordi (1983), and he was distinguished by the French Government with the decoration of \"Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres\" (1985). In the 1980s he also began to work in larger formats, while expanding his chromatic range with darker tones. His artistic production also includes the creation of stained-glass windows, theatre sets and graphic work, as well as his literary work.
