Espai Carmen Thyssen Sant Feliu de Guíxols
HOMENATGE A GARRETA
Alex Pallí (Sant Feliu de Guíxols, 1972) has constructed a visual poetics that transcends mere pictorial gesture. Beyond figuration or narrative transmission, his work is oriented towards a cartography of sound and temporality, an emotional architecture where each stroke dialogues with resonances of a collective unconscious. Since the mid-nineties, Pallí has consolidated a visual language that engages with thought more than with representation.
The project Chromatic Dance is inscribed as an extension of this universe, but adopting the music of Juli Garreta as a structural motif. It is not about translating notes into pigments, but about reproducing their 'architectural attribute' — the structure, the breath, the rupture — as if color were a syncopation, as if the stroke were an orchestral breath. The monastery, with its historical geometry, acts as a sounding board: each spot on the canvas resonates not only with the gesture, but also with memory, void, and the undelimited space.
Starting from this premise, Pallí's work has conceptual pivots in the previous series: in Big Data, where the tension between pixel and spot evokes the impossibility of separating experience and quantification; in Smashed Forms, which accuses the Big Bang of the plastic gesture and the formation of chromatic particles that overflow the frame; and in Happening, the great event-image in which the celebration of pictorial abundance becomes a territory of intuition rather than interpretation.
These series function as heuristic analogues: they are reference layers for understanding the Chromatic Dance as a confluence of primitive drives, digital structures, and liturgical rhythm.
Pallí's free exploration, which unfolds as a kind of emotional archaeology applied to color, recognizes painting as a perceptual matrix—not as representation, but as an active entity. In this sense, his work embodies the dialectic between control and explosion: a compositional restraint that spares no energy, and a gesture that does not abandon rigor. The music of Garreta, with its unique Mediterranean cadence, is not a visual motif: it is an internal logic that metarepresents the(their) emotional heritage within each piece.
Finally, the Chromatic Dance challenges us to abandon the past/present dichotomy. The project does not assert that Garreta paints with Pallí, but rather recognizes a shared fundamental impulse: to reset perception. Like a score that is recomposed, every color and every fracture is an interruption that seemingly fragments the surface, but in reality generate their own axiom of continuity. It is a mental landscape, constructed between collective memory and the freedom of gesture, which invites us to breathe in this perceptual jolt as an aesthetic and philosophical act.
