The Vila Casas Foundation hails the legacy of Esther Boix with the most ambitious retrospective

Sometimes, life imposes itself on art. In a 1957 self-portrait, the Empordà painter and pedagogue Esther Boix (1927-2014), one of the most important of her generation, is a sad woman. Beside her is her husband, the poet Ricard Creus, equally contrite. Both have strangely elongated necks, as if Francoism were infiltrating their bodies and deforming them, as can be seen from this Friday at the exhibition that the Vila Casas Foundation is dedicating to Esther Boix at Espais Volart, titledEsther Boix. A World in Struggle. It is the most ambitious retrospective ever dedicated to her, and an unmissable exhibition.

Returning to the portrait, the couple leaves for Milan with this heaviness inside, but this trip changed their lives: it was in the Italian city where they learned they were expecting their first and only child, Adrià. They returned, because they wanted him to be born in Catalonia. And upon their return, despite Francoism, everything was different. While the self-portrait is done in brownish tones, one of the first portraits Boix made of her son is full of light and delicacy. "In the self-portrait they are like masks, self-absorbed characters. The trip to Milan had a dark beginning, but the end was luminous," states Bernat Puigdollers, the artistic director of the Vila Casas Foundation and curator of the exhibition. "Milan opened them up to new ways of living, it allowed them to enter a circle of intellectuals, artists, illustrators, writers and filmmakers, and it allowed them to live in a different way," he adds.

Furthermore, upon their return, Boix's painting acquired a more directly social character, both in terms of commitment to working people and to feminism. And later, from the 1960s onwards, when she was one of the initiators of the Estampa Popular group, the criticism became frontal and open. The paintings are full of symbols with which she denounces the cruelty of the Francoist authorities. Among the most poignant paintings is One Day They Will Eat You (1972), featuring a dismembered body served on a platter.

From the darkness of Gutiérrez Solana to the light

A life on the margins. Esther Boix grew up marked by the polio she suffered at the age of two. "This means having a more introspective life, not being able to play with other children with the same freedom, and also opening the door to wanting to focus on the margins of society and also pictorial and artistic ones," explains Puigdollers. Regarding her painting, initially influenced by the darkness of Gutiérrez Solana, it is characterized by being "rather dark, by a certain geometrization and simplification of forms, and also by the fact of highlighting the misery of the post-war period," as the curator says.

Later, the exhibition, which will be open until July 12, collects her time at La Llotja, which was important not for the training she received, but for the small group she formed around her, which included Ricard Creus, who was then just a friend, the painter Mercè Vallverdú, and the sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs. The meetings took place in Esther Boix's father's apartment. "We must understand this group above all as a group of friendship: it had been born naturally and basically what they wanted was to exchange knowledge. They listened to music, organized poetry readings, and also took small excursions where they went to visit monuments throughout Catalonia. Notable among these were those they made to visit Gaudí's work, at a time when almost no one was talking about it, because they began to be recovered in the 1950s," explains Puigdollers.

Another aspect of this relationship was the creation of the ephemeral group Postectura, as an opportunity to have more visibility. "They claimed a return to essence, a pictorial and sculptural essence that starts from real experience, but seeks the intimate structure of existence," says the curator, who has dedicated one of the rooms to the pedagogical work of Esther Boix and Ricard Creus at the L'ARC Expression School.

The same Esther Boix defined the evolution of her career as the transition from "struggle" during Francoism to "song". That is to say, after the dictator's death, she embarked on new paths with other commitments. "The focus of her work changes, and she begins to move towards landscape," says Puigdollers. This evolution was marked by the move of her studio to a penthouse in Girona street, Barcelona, and later to El Perer, a farmhouse in the municipality of Les Preses (Garrotxa). "In addition to political consciousness, she also shows ecological consciousness and talks about pollution. And a process begins in which the human figure starts to disappear and the landscape begins a process of dissolution until it almost reaches white," says Puigdollers. "She ends up having an almost pantheistic view of the world, that is, the world has its own life and we are a small thing in the middle of the universe, of the environment, of the landscape. There is a process of calm, of communion with the environment, and I don't know if the word is disenchantment, but rather a relativization of human existence," concludes the curator.