Goodbye to Zush/Evru, the Catalan artist who created his own state

BarcelonaHe was born Albert Porta in 1946 and, after a brief stay in the Barcelona mental hospital that marked his career, adopted the nickname Zush until 2001. That year he began to build a new universe and adopted the name he never abandoned: Evru. The artist, one of the most unique in the Catalan art world, died this Thursday at the age of 79. Under the name Evru, he had been building a social and political consciousness that would lead him to imagine his own territory: the Evrugo Mental State. An invented country with all that this implies: language, flag, anthem, currency, a system of diplomatic relations, and a set of emblems that give it the substance of a state.

His entire pictorial output referred to this universe. A state that is mental and emotional, but also iconographic: it unfolds in drawings, paintings, collages, photomontages, and artist's books. His work is linked to the character he had created and the multiple unfoldings that emerged. He explained that drawing each character was a meticulous task and a form of meditation or prayer. They were emotional self-portraits. And, although he has often been described as "multifaceted," he preferred to define himself with his own label: a "digital psychomanual" artist.

"Evrugo's state has become an autocracy. He uses state symbols to make people believe it's a state. We all have an individual territory. If I get too close to you, I'll enter your territory, and you'll have to give me permission to enter or not enter it. An animal you find in bed or in the bathroom. Children in the countryside carve out a territory or a space for themselves on a tree. We all have the need to create our own state," he explained in an interview with The Weather in 2020.

Artist, scientist and mystic

He was a self-taught artist and liked to describe himself as ArtCienMist, meaning artist, scientist, and mystic. He began drawing as a child, but it was the French gallery owner René Metras who encouraged him to continue creating. In his later years, he continued to explore his "individual mythology," which draws on influences such as surrealism, dirty art, science, and mysticism. He was a pioneer in Catalonia in the use of computers for painting and in art created with new media. "I'm a pioneer in Catalonia in doing art therapy, but now they do it everywhere. I've done many workshops, especially with schizophrenics," he explained in an interview conducted by the ARA on the occasion of the exhibition he held at the Senda gallery in 2020.

His work is part of the collections of museums such as MoMA (New York), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), MACBA (Barcelona), the Guggenheim (New York), and the Ye Um Foundation (Seoul), among others. In addition to having exhibited in renowned museums throughout his career, he has also received several awards: the National Engraving Prize in 1997, the Laus Prize in 1999, the City of Barcelona Prize in 2000, and the ACCA Art Critics Award in 2003. The Fundació Suñol dedicated a solo exhibition to him. Door}Zush.1961-197, which showed his evolution from the first works of his artistic career.