Xavier Oriach

Xavier Oriach is a Spanish painter of the news École of Paris, born in 1927. Halfway of painting and the Gravure its work evokes the material texture of reality.

Biography

Xavier Oriach is born the November 20th 1927 with Sabadell (Catalogne), where were established at the 15th century its distances ancestors “Oriac”, originating in the Massif Central. To create a workshop of seam there his/her parents settle in 1930 with Barcelona, accompanied by its great-uncle, the modernistic Photographe Albert Rifà, dependant on the Catalan intellectual medium. When they leave in 1934 to open a manufacture with Valencia, it is with him that Xavier Oriach returns in Sabadell, passing in its new studio the biggest part of its childhood, observing the stages which mark out its work and the construction which is at the origin of any esthetic vision. Encouraged by the circle of the artists who attend the workshop, Oriach starts as of the end of the the Thirties to draw and paint.

In 1943 Xavier Oriach leaves Sabadell to join his/her parents, works one moment in the trade of his/her father who incites it to take courses of Dessin. It enters the following year to the School of the Art schools of Valencia, takes part in 1947 in the foundation, the activities and the exposures of the group of avant-garde “Z” of which he is the youngest child. It is pointed out by the Fauvisme of its interiors and its landscapes. The purse which the French Institute of the city grants to him spontaneously allows him, after a first personal exposure in Catalonia, to flee the Franquisme.

In January 1951, accommodated by his/her friend the guitarist Narciso Yepes, Xavier Oriach settles in Paris. To continue to paint, it exerts the most various trades there. In Barcelona it has already, any young person, met Antoni Clavé, in Valencia Manolo Gil, Mompo, Sempere, in Paris it becomes acquainted with the Catalan Antoni Tàpies but also of Eduardo Chillida and Palazuelo. A few months hardly after its arrival Bernard Dorival are interested in its work and asks him to hang with him the retrospective of the work of Braque that it organize with the National museum of modern art. In 1953 the Breteau Gallery presents its paintings and Oriach is integrated quickly into the New School of Paris by taking part in many collective exposures, to the Salon of New Realities like to the Salon of May.

The mode of Franco tries in the the Fifties to cause the return of painters whom it can be opposed to its ideology but that it wishes to recover in their ensuring a recognition likely to improve its image. In spite of the requests Xavier Oriach does not regain Barcelona nor does not settle in Madrid. If it leaves Paris it is, in 1979, to be established with the Jouy-on-Eure where it remains regularly since its arrival in France. It made there of its workshop a meeting place and debates, creates a Center of contemporary art where it introduces in particular his friend Pierre Tal Coat, Raoul Ubac and Tàpies, among the artists whose steps express with his some convergence, and Biennial Sculpture animates founds.

As from 1991 Xavier Oriach shares his existence between the Normandy, where several retrospectives of its work are organized, and Catalonia where it exposes regularly.

Work

Arrived at Paris in the middle of the sharp controversies which mark the abandonment of realism, Oriach takes the route quickly of the absence of representation. Breaking the last reports/ratios of its language with the spectacles of reality, it will recognize the clean possibilities which it offers to build of the new visions delivered of the intuitions immediate, irreducible with any identification, indissociable of the forms and colors, returned in their wild state, that it freely associates according to their only significant values.

Purified extents, contrasted, that balance then Oriach express, in the tightening of the range of the colors, an attention with the matters which will become, with the length of its advance, one of the major characteristics of its paintings. Their initially transparent surfaces and crossings later of the logograms of writings first, then pasted, largely built, veined and rough like stones, encourage the glance to approach, reduce its spontaneous distance, while the objects and the horizons familiar of the world are erased in front of the skin bruissante and the negligible landscapes of the material universe.

On the length of the the Eighties the broad fabrics of Oriach, in a cyclopean bond of flagstones to the gray and blue moderate, think like walls bleached of lime the echoes of Mediterranean clearnesses. They darken thereafter, making emerge on their funds without horizon of undecided presences, like enlightened of an internal light. If one can there distinguish sometimes from mysterious staircases or elements from architecture, their titles, far from summarizing the visions of them, maintain only the distant relationship with works which they would have rather function, not without ludic behavior, to call, renonçant with any reducing designation. In their extreme precision some of them, contrary, nourished culture plural, Catalan, French and Hispanic, of Oriach, imprègent them one duration which makes go up the tragic course of the ages ( the axe of the warrior unearthed with Tolosa in Lengadoc , falls It from the mercenary Simon de Montfort , 1990).

The step of Xavier Oriach inflects with measurement in a new matierism. If it continues to paint on fabric, it has simultaneously recourse to vast wood panels which it coats, inventing of the techniques which allow him, halfway engraving and Bas-relief, to act more directly on the matter. Oriach modifies the distance from the glance there, balance in a threshold from where, without being detached from pure surfaces from visible, it starts to distinguish the beings which compose it. Pass thus on its paintings the silhouettes of the mountains and the fields, the objects, the women and the men. A whole oneiric Bestiaire accompanies them, bird, ox or wolf, horse, fish or owl, which join of the fabulous creatures like hardly delivered their fossil prints or going up the imaginary unmemorable one and older legends.

Under the same twilight glows and night the profiles of rocks and summits which take shape with back-light in later works of Oriach tint them of a new paysagism. Far from any anecdotic or exotic intention, it gives them for their magic spell-binding, in the search for poetic equivalences, the place names crossed at the time of voyages, to Spain and in the Arab world. Surfaces with the slate colors and schists, scums with blue deep, make there hesitate the vision at the edge of a still undifferentiated matter magmatic, mineral and alive sharing or exchanging their identity in continual metamorphoses. In the middle of this unstable universe emerge around 2003 of the pearly or ashed forms ship hulls which, under a lunar light, reactivate the old ancestral bottom accumulated around the marine voyages.

In another crossing, its paintings appear to approach more still of the rock than suggest their texture and their construction, to insert in mineral crumplings of the material intimacy. Xavier Oriach does not celebrate there only the matter for itself, in his blind man spontaneousness. It rather constitutes in its work the space or the medium of a language, continuously enriched by new signs enabling him to aim reality differently. Delivering forms and colors of any relation particular to the things, works of Oriach seem to induce a broader report/ratio with reality, make appear a kind of “on-object” including the totality of the world, that no spontaneous perception could deliver. On their surfaces moired, changeantes according to the incidence of the light, the glance traverses cracks and fractures, emerges in mysterious caves which the bluish cliffs of underground glaciers or the radiations of blocks of sulfur illuminate.

Passed like on the other side of visible, the work of Oriach seems to make reach its towards underground, to discover in dreams bachelardiens its internal landscapes. While combining, out of the transitory human duration, a deep past of the Earth's crust and the present of ceaseless to become, she proposes a new feeling of reality, materiality which constitutes the screen of it.

Quotation

“These forms result from references which I saw in my voyages, nature, architecture… They are my writing. The forms have a terribly pictorial direction, the color sticks to it but that is perhaps not essence. What imports, it is the research of the quintessence of the form. (...) Thirty years ago, my painting was gestural. The matter helps me to model, to express this form which I want to give to my painting. ”

Matter of Xavier Oriach, in Xavier Oriach, Sixty years of painting , Somogy Editions of art, Paris/Museum of Evreux, Evreux, 2005, pp. 61 and 75.

Judgments

“That can we underline in the work of Xavier Oriach? Initially its capacity to evolve/move and to express themselves in the same language in margin of the modes and market trends, then a technical control able to convert the forms and the matter into communicating poetry in an abstracted pictorial space, moved away from the images of the world (...). The work of Xavier Oriach tends towards only one objective: in the ideal of the rigor, to create an organic world transcended in original spaces, balanced or moving, endowed with a rate/rhythm clean and populated the confused ones and partial resemblances. ”

Maia Creus, Xavier Oriach. A different art, still , in Xavier Oriach, Sixty years of painting , Somogy Editions of art, Paris/Museum of Evreux, Evreux, 2005, p. 20.

“How, at any moment, the things start they to be detached from the shade, to cross the thin border of the absence, still staggering, to rock in the visible one? Suddenly painting makes some test precariousness and, adapting the glance on their quivering texture, gives to touching, in its amazing strangeness, the imperceptible one, inhuman irruption of what is in the being. (...) At the moment when it wavers with the edge of the present, it is, involving the visible entire one in its dubious loading, the Boat of the World which crosses the painting of Oriach. ”

Michel-Georges Bernard, Xavier Oriach. With the Doors of the Earth , in Xavier Oriach, Sixty years of painting , Somogy Editions of art, Paris/Museum of Evreux, Evreux, 2005, p. 14.

Selective bibliography

Xavier Oriach , texts Catalan of Dolors Forrellad I Doménech, Joaquim Salted-Sanahuja and Eric Villedieu, Musée of Art, Sabadell, 1988.
Xavier Oriach , foreword Castilian of Maria LLuïsa Borràs, ASB Gallery, Barcelona, 1990.
Xavier Oriach , foreword of Sophie Fourny-Dargere, texts of Joaquim Salted-Sanahuja, Gerard Xuriguera, Luis Porquet Gracia, R. Hanrion and Eric Villedieu, Musée A.G. Foal, Vernon, 1990.
Xavier Oriach , foreword Castilian of Maria Lluïsa Borràs, ASB Gallery, Barcelona, 1990.
Xavier Oriach, Retrospective , texts of Gerard Xuriguera and R. Hanrion, Gallery Of Bellay, Saint-Aignan Mount, Rouen, April-May 1995.
Xavier Oriach, the Bestiary, Paintings 1989-1999 , French texts and as a Catalan of Maia Creus and Angela Cuenca Julià, Museum A.G. Foal, Vernon, 2000.
Xavier Oriach Catalan text of Maia Creus, Galeria Wove, Barcelona, 2003.
Xavier Oriach, Sixty years of painting , texts of Michel-Georges Bernard, Robert Ferrer, Maia Creus, and Maurice Maillard, Somogy Editions of art, Paris/Musée of Evreux, Evreux, 2005, 144 p.
Gerard Gamand, Xavier Oriach: when the matter becomes poetry , in " The Gazette of the Drouot" Hotel; , Paris, May 5th 2006 (p. 228).
Xavier Oriach , texts Catalan of Maia Creus, Antoni Clapès, Philippe Gelain and Maria Balcells, Academy of the Art schools, Sabadell, 2006,78 p.
Xavier Oriach , texts Catalan of Joaquim Salted-Sanahuja, Antoni Clapès and Josep Maria Ripoll, Galerie Wove, Barcelona, 2007.

External bond

Xavier Oriach in the Museums of France (Joconde bases)

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