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Mafet
1987
Mixed media on canvas
Dimensions: Diptych: 244 x 244 cm
Reference: ACF0423


Mafet is the name of a village that represents the landscape of Guinovart's childhood. The Spanish Civil War shattered the life of his family, who had to take refuge in the country and seek protection in nature with rustic, popular roots, which has become the element around which the different aspects of his output revolve. Constantly delving into his own discourse, he takes up ideas and concepts he has worked on before and, since 1958, has incorporated collage as a means of experimenting with forms, textures and colours. The extraordinary gallery of characters in the rural world, which early in his career were depicted in austere, noble scenes, disappear and give way to a sober material quality. Different mineral and vegetable objects and elements are incorporated into all kinds of media—fibrocement, methacrylate, any type of paper or cardboard, cloths and hessian—and are mixed with painting whose components are predominantly Expressionist. Texture and colour bear expressive witness to reality and are used to evoke his years of life in the country during the war. In Mafet, stubble, grain, straw and wheat are mixed with earth and mud and arranged on the canvas to convey the traces of the places where he has lived. He reclaims the drawn line, which he abandoned in his Informalist period, and marks out expressive areas of colour that bring together solidified fragments of life. From an essentially life-loving stance, Guinovart is revealed as a pantheist who is used to playing with the sensuality of material. Mafet enables us to take part in a place which memory has made timeless, a place of tangible sensations, lived with intensity.