The life-or-death art of Neus Dalmau

Caldes de EstracNeus Dalmau (Barcelona, ​​​​1960) earned her living as a graphic designer. As an artist, she moved in the underground world, to prevent the art market from endangering her "most genuine expression," as Dalmau herself says on the occasion of the exhibition that Palau Foundation of Caldes d'Estrac dedicates until October 19, entitled The Verdaguer force and curated by Joan Puigdefàbrega. Dalmau claims that due to a deep inferiority complex, he would never have dared knock on the door of an institution like the Fundació Palau, but his life took a dramatic turn a couple of years ago. A week after burying his mother, Dalmau was diagnosed with a brain tumor. "The first thing I thought about was not losing what I've done, so I cataloged all my work. I saw that it was all beautiful, and I decided that before I died I would explain it," says Dalmau.

Dalmau didn't plan to hold an exhibition, but she did give a poetic lecture to explain what she had done. "I've always worked absolutely like an aborigine, without thinking. And now this exhibition helps me understand what I've done with my life and what has happened to me," she explains. "And then I realized that this exhibition is much more than an exhibition, much more than a retrospective, because it has served as a healing for me, and also."

Likewise, with this exhibition, Dalmau speaks openly about her mediumistic nature and explains that what she calls "the Verdaguer force" has guided her for more than twenty years and has helped her heal. "I didn't dare, let's say, to come out of the closet because I considered it an obscurantist or superstitious world; I didn't like it. But now I realize the virtue, the quality, of this. I put myself at the service of a state, as Antonin Artaud says, of total receptivity," the artist warns.

From Hell to Paradise

For Dalmau, art can be "a matter of life or death." How The Divine ComedyThe exhibition is divided into four sections, from Hell to Paradise: the first corresponds to the "punk years," as Dalmau says, when he was part of a dissident scene that included groups like Sopa Negra and poets like Enric Casasses. The tour continues with the emergence of Verdaguer's strength, the expansion of that strength, and its healing. "The survival instinct fuels your intuition about what you have to do. And in the meantime, obviously, I haven't stopped painting because it's my hobbyhorse," says the artist. Furthermore, his paintings often have a literary character, and in his creative universe, Verdaguer engages in dialogue with Artaud and Walter Benjamin, and later on, Verdaguer hands over to Llull. And the figure of Lluís Maria Xirinacs occupies a primordial place as a master.

In the first section of the exhibition, the public encounters a dramatic event that has marked Dalmau: when she was ten years old, she suffered abuse while her parents were in the hospital. "In the healing process, I search for the origin of the tumor in many ways, and in the end it comes out: the neighbor across the hall, who was a police officer, abused me. And I had covered it up because it seemed intolerable. This trauma has been encysted inside my brain my whole life. weren't aggressive," she explains.

Dalmau began reading Verdaguer at the suggestion of the playwright Àngel Carmona, and soon the author of Canigou It became an obsession. In 2000, she received a job offer from the Art Cent gallery, located on the ground floor of number 7 Mirallers Street, where Verdaguer held his exorcism sessions on the fourth floor. Dalmau couldn't resist and knocked on the door. She was greeted by a Dominican painter, Rafael Pérez Concepción, who, surprisingly, was working on a triptych depicting a battle between angels and demons.

With Casasses, Dalmau made some performances Verdaguerian poetic-artistic works, but the paintings she made were destroyed by a companion who mistreated her, until she managed to escape and was able to settle in a large and bright studio in Lloret de Mar, where she found the first monument dedicated to Verdaguer in Catalonia, the Angel Monument, from 1904. That was the turning point for the dismembered bodies in his paintings to begin to come together. With Salvador Brotons he premiered theRanda's Cantata at the Palau de la Música in 2017, and the tour concludes with three female figures in their prime, following a video documenting an action he performed at Cap de Creus while in the midst of treatment for his brain tumor: for a whole year, he left a stone he had taken from the cave in Crete where a head with a headache was born. He cut it with an axe, and from the cut, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, was born. "I'm already healed," says the artist.