In 1948, a group of young artists and intellectuals committed to the avant-garde (Brossa, Cuixart, Ponç, A. Puig, Tàpies, and Tharrats) came together to found a magazine that served as a vehicle for expressing openly contestatory and rebellious attitudes towards the barren cultural and artistic landscape of the time. They felt a special attraction to the magical and mysterious side of reality. They combined surrealist influences, Mironian elements, Klee's style, with other literary, philosophical, and musical inspirations, all underpinned by a Central European mentality more inclined towards the dark and Faustian than to Mediterranean clarity. During these years, we find works created in a variety of techniques, from ink drawings to watercolours and oils of abstract compositions ranging from geometric automatism to the conjunction of symbolic elements, celestial figures, and signs forming enigmatic landscapes and magical cosmologies. This surreal, imaginative, and poetic phase, plastically ethereal and dominated by drawing, had been preceded by material experiments, collages, and debris recovered from post-war ruins, landscapes, and abstractions of expressionist affiliation.

It illustrates a dense informalist cycle that the author began in the mid-1950s (the Lyon period) when he produced the most unusual amalgamations of materials and techniques, unknowingly coinciding with the art of others, Dubuffet and Fautrier. Works, often on wood, resolved by attacking the support (burned, incised...) and/or gluing various materials and later discernible objects, culminating in the so-called "heteroplastic constructions" (1957). After this initial experimental phase, there is a deepening and reflection on the expressive capacities of matter that crystallise in magnificent discoveries that elevate him to the peak of success and international recognition (São Paulo Biennial, 1959). His praised surfaces of metallic iridescence (golden, silver, copper) with pronounced textures and his particular use of dripping constitute a highly personal alchemy that seeks to exalt the most humble through a splendid metamorphosis achieved through unusual technical procedures.

Amid this informalist apogee, other expressive concerns are already emerging, which is indicative of a constant in Cuixart: the escape from his own successes to face new challenges that prevent falling into any type of creative reiteration. As he begins the 1960s, still within the same material language, he addresses the sexual theme openly with works of an aggressive relief, tremendously daring for that time of taboos and repression. The atmosphere feels oppressive to him, and he resonates with external trends such as New Dada and Pop Art or Nouveau Réalisme from very personal perspectives: in 1963, he surprises with the famous lacerated dolls, symptomatic of a deep existential anguish. The object is also incorporated into his work in equally dramatic and expressive standalone pieces.

With a prelude to his fully figurative phase, he worked on an original and interesting erotic-magical series with intellectualist tones (1965-1969), where he combines material relief with calligraphic drawing. In the 1970s, he opened up to the theme of the figure – always subjected to an expressionist deformation of reality – while allowing his hedonistic and baroque vein to flow impetuously.

In the face of the tragic vision of those tortured dolls – the first signs of expression through the human figure – a trivial burlesque satire seems to oppose it from the 1970s onwards. However, despite manifesting a sumptuous and grotesque appearance with a touch of vanity that dangerously skims the edge of kitsch, the divergence is mainly of a formal nature. It represents a new moral revulsion, in this case against hypocrisy and foolishness, through a language that is also surreal, expressionist, and pathetic, maintaining an evident sinister background. These are works that, on one hand, appeal to the senses with their voluptuous preciousness and the great fluidity of execution, and on the other hand, appeal to the subconscious, to the most hidden ghosts and obsessions, including signs of a dualistic nature. Distorted faces and bodies with implausible proportions that, despite their monstrosity, often possess a disturbing and strange beauty. Anxious and perverse spectres that are inscribed in the most surreal and grotesque Goyaesque tradition and seem to proclaim, like baroque vanitas, the inexorability of death. By the 1980s, Cuixart shifts towards a coarse work with chromatic stridency, abundant in women with pompous headdresses.

The content of this last area corresponds to the work of the last decade of the 20th century, a masterful compendium of all the previous experience embodied in the sober and balanced language found in its subterranean introspections of nature. It is a broad and dense cycle – abundant in large formats – endowed with a sublime aesthetic sense that manifests the joyous fullness of a singular and fruitful pictorial personality. Starting from an unprecedented conception of a theme as traditional as landscape, the author distances himself from visual reality to delve into the deep and mythical spirit of nature, the mystery of the forests, and the magical and silent lyricism of the earth's fertility. Compositions of splendid maturity where geometries, biomorphologies, signs, and some small figures or animals are perfectly combined within a fascinating setting. Precisely aspects such as metallic iridescence and the meticulous work of textures or the persistence of the magical and signic factor in these works from the 90s, towards the end of his pictorial career, manifest the continuity of the author's reflection on the components of a language of unlimited resources and evident conceptual solidity.

Textos: Dra. Raquel Medina