Enric Ansesa: "The colorful facades of the Onyar River in Girona were painted despite pressure."

GironaOutside the walls of Girona, next to the old quarries, lies the studio of one of the great exponents of contemporary Catalan art. Enric Ansesa (Girona, 1945) has been cultivating his own pictorial language for more than five decades, full of symbols, on all the colors of black. And he remains fully active, without delegating any of his production, even if it's just the hammering of hundreds of small needles. His chaotic and bright workshop, with magnificent views of the city, is a vantage point from which one can follow everything from Canigó to Montseny. "A broad-spectrum antibiotic," as he himself defines it. But not enough medicine to maintain the connection with the city where he was born. "I've always wanted to work in Girona, for convenience and because it's a good place to live," he explains. "But for the past few years, I've had little connection to Girona, by choice."

Critical of the cultural drift of the city –"In Girona, all that matters is escaping from study, because the most important thing is still the container and not the content", he says–, he has seen in The opening of the new AWL gallery (Airas Wang de Lafée), managed by the young Pepe Baena, the possibility of a certain change, an "update." It is on display until the end of May, in the first chapter of an exhibition that can also be seen at another young Barcelona gallery: Fuga, directed by Maria Costafreda. Two new projects that seek to restore the often little-known and underappreciated work of the author of Girona's most iconic image: the color palette of the houses of the Onyar.

No plaque commemorates him, but Ansesa, in collaboration with Jaume Faixó (1952-1998), devised the palette of 39 colors with evocative names such as Fog Grey, Escudella Earth, and Church Ash that have made Girona a picture-postcard city.

The smell of the lock

Ansesa's dictionary of symbols, from the stitch and the cross, through unstitching, sutures, needles, horizons, and folds, to the invented calligraphy that takes us back to the origins of writing in Mesopotamia, would not be understood without the Francoist Girona where she was born and where she was born. "I come from a Girona that smells like locks, the Girona in black and white, of mourning and funerals, of the religious fundamentalism of the first Fridays of the month," she reflects. In this context, on a street in El Carme where conversations were repeated, like a game of telephone, following the entire Onyar River, from the Barri Vell to the Old Cemetery, Ansesa experienced "terrible pressure" as a teenager due to her parents' divorce, which led her to drop out of high school. "It led me to a very deep closure, and I think that's why I became a painter," she notes.

ADAG and the black

"The Girona world had a very limited scale of cultural values," he recalls. "We were very isolated from the contemporary world." It was at the end of the Franco regime and in the first rays of the Transition that many initiatives emerged in Girona, leading to the creation of the Democratic Assembly of Artists of Girona (ADAG) in 1976, of which Ansesa was an active part. One of its first steps was to recover the name of Rambla Llibertat. "A great symbol of change," he points out. It was during this period that Ansesa's work progressively embraced all shades of black. Today, one of his canvases has a dozen layers to achieve the harmonious finish he seeks to discover. "The works are nothing more than scanners of the sensations and thoughts of each individual," he reflects. "I consider black as a source of energy and power."

The facades of the river

For Ansesa, then, her work draws on "Girona in black and white," but darkness is a way of showcasing all the colors of the Universe. Perhaps the clearest example of this intention is the project that culminated four decades ago with the transformation of the façade of the Onyar River in Girona. The houses left behind their grays to embrace a color palette painted for the first time on curtain fabric. What little is known about the people of Girona is that what has now become the city's postcard image was a very difficult decision to implement in the mid-1980s.

"One day they will realize that this arrived and was done this way because there were people who endured today." Ansesa and Faixó were in charge of choosing the color palette for each of the 83 properties that were renovated through the architectural project of Josep Maria Fuses and Joan Maria Viader. For weeks, the artist recalls that every day at seven in the morning he would go down to the Onyar to supervise the façade painters when they first applied a layer of resin to make the colours last longer, as they preferred to go faster and go straight to the chosen palette and skip that step.

Internationalization

Now, as he enters his 80s, Ansesa explains that he is experiencing a "phase of establishing the total internationalization" of his work before his death. "All that matters in art is the market," he asserts, which is why he believes it is "important" to be on top of it, just as he got up early every morning 41 years ago so that the Onyar facades would endure until today. But despite the colors of the river, he continues to paint in black today.