Pau Escat is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Barcelona. His work investigates color and light in contact with materials, specifically the visual effect that this generates. His interest in observing these processes comes from two fields that have always been in his life: nature and jewelry. At first, one would say that they belong to opposing fields -the natural and the intervened, the wild and the domesticated, the living and the stony- but for the artist, they constitute the basis of the same way of looking and creating.
Nature, especially landscapes and atmospheres, allows him to express both the physical space, where effects such as color and light occur, and the intimate space, where color and light are associated with emotions. In this sense, the artist is interested in the pictorial tradition that, from a particular appreciation of landscape and nature, is a precursor of abstraction. In particular, his work focuses on the Dutch landscape painters of the seventeenth century, from whom he takes the bipartite composition of the painting and the characteristic vibration of the stormy skies. The impressionists have also been essential in his way of looking at nature, for their pictorial work of atmospheres that already brings them close to abstraction. In the artworks of the artist, a certain state of stillness, contemplation, and silence in front of natural phenomena is essential. His proposal is precisely interested in these moments dedicated to seeing for the pleasure of seeing, without haste or objective to fulfill. Thus, her paintings retain this atmospheric weightlessness, the result of contemplation, which gives a livid character to the set of elements.
Jewelry, on the other hand, represents for him the creative moment par excellence. After contemplation comes the action, which already reflects the artist’s experience on the canvas. Pau Escat belongs to a family that has been dedicated to jewelry for more than a century. He was trained and worked in this profession, designing pieces that introduced him to the craftsmanship of materials, textures, and light. In addition, the art of creating jewelry provided him with a knowledge of symbolism that he recognizes as central to his artistic conception. His work gathers the experience of nature and works it to give it form and channel emotion, just as in jewelry the material becomes something more thanks to the jeweler. Like the symbol, the artwork transmits and communicates an idea, but admits a game between the subjective and the universal meanings. For the artist, this work with visual concepts is the basis of artistic creation. Always, of course, looking for the mystery rather than the explicit, through the abstract language that partially veils the symbol. For this reason, his works do not have a specific title either, building a diaphanous space for the viewer to interpret from his reception.
