Afterparty: Francesc Rosselló solo exhibition

AFTERPARTY

FRANCESC ROSELLÓ

Text by Óscar Manrique

After a party, we know only too well that not all roads lead home. Perhaps getting there is the least exciting part of all that can happen to us. So we prolong the journey home, wandering through whatever happens, making it as long and stimulating as our imagination and the remnants of last night's events allow. In this way, exhausted and perhaps a little tipsy, but with our curiosity intact, we often find ourselves in search of an unexpected destination.

Rosselló paints these journeys home, these surreal scenes, as if they were mythical, a journey of self-discovery, referential and exotic, born of a fragmentation of reality, not of reality itself. He tries to get closer to the immediate, to maximise expressiveness, because he wants to transmit the perceived world in a wise mixture of the dreamed, the imagined and the real. The extraordinary side of the things that surround him, which he always recognises and which manifests itself in the aftermath of a party, in the quintessential social gathering, the youthful scream; an uncompromising gaze that dominates the space.

There are recurring elements in his work, as if everything that is seen, read, heard, thought or wished for is imbued with a stubborn force, that of those who are able to be moved by the essential and willing to extract the fundamental from the everyday detail; turning the aftermath of a party into an exciting and new event. That's why he's less concerned with the forms of painting than with what to paint, a metaphor he constructs in each of his canvases, which he articulates and names like the great passages of the Odyssey: a barefoot woman, Ulysses returning home. "This night was surreal", but surrealist journeys are sought, while this path seems to have been found, as if his scenes were not arranged in a specific space, but discovered in a specific moment, "captured".

The surreal atmosphere, the peculiar use of time and space, the sarcastic smoke, the references to Generation Z, everything in his canvases is unsettling. The disconcerting aspect of these dreamlike journeys painted and projected by Rosselló is that they have no return; the characters are always in the middle of the journey or the task, visiting numerous places, real or imaginary, desired or abandoned, but their end or beginning is never witnessed, what is visited or expected is neither memorable nor fabulous, and that's why the journey, the project, the desire or the reality of the journey always breaks in. A poetic journey with a touch of vulgarity. Just like his palette, saturated, full of majestic assonances and daring contrasts - perhaps the result of his colour blindness - that bring freshness to the narrative scene. Just as the richness of this colour, the flatness of the surface and the simplification express uplifting emotions, Rosselló also uses the line for expressive purposes. There are places where it appears thicker and then becomes finer, diffuse and intermittent, creating organic shapes and dividing the colours. It's the naive yet skilful brushstroke of a young artist with a recognisable aesthetic, who has already created a complex and unique visual universe that traverses the street and myth. All of Rosselló's work can be translated into this kind of "fuzzy logic", a theory that advocates a philosophical view that avoids dividing the universe into two parts, avoiding confrontation and maintaining a sinuous reality in which the boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred, a mixture of true history and drunken, dissociated fantasy, but one that has happened in our heads.

That's why, in many of his works, he portrays himself as the protagonist of the tragedy, trying to prove that this could be the place of his dreams. These are the places he wants to recognise as his own, with a slightly ancient atmosphere, but not archaeological: a melancholy place, perhaps, because none of them is the end of the journey, but the stage on which he wants to get lost. The other characters in the scenes, almost always women, have their own stories, their own memories, often different from his, with whom he crosses paths on his way back, in the same place, without saying anything to each other, like a dreamed memory, constructed lyrically. He also looks for connections between objects and scenes, almost epic in nature. A story he can tell passionately the morning after, "you won't believe it", the function of every journey: to return and be told.

AFTERPARTY is a return that we experience as a dream and then as a dream within another dream; aren't Rosselló's typical scenes always a kind of perpetual and stubborn daydream? Images that are closer to the symbolic abyss than to the logic proposed by the surrealist aesthetic that the scenes themselves exude, a view inherited from painters like Paul Devaux, who was always between the two worlds. Rosselló has the nature of an image linked to a certain gaze that is anything but retinal: the gaze of visionaries, of those capable of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, the journey home into an adventure.

A free verse of the new figurative art that is invading the Spanish Mediterranean.