FEDERICO GRANELL. De Viaje

07/11/2019

FEDERICO GRANELL (Cangas de Narcea, Asturias, 1974) introduces his first exhibition in Santiago de Compostela, coinciding with his participation as an guest artist at Compostela Ilustrada, an annual encounter that brings together famous drawers and enthusiasts of the art of drawing who share the city for several days to represent it from multiple perspectives.

This exhibition includes a selection of paintings and drawings in notebooks that are the result of the artist?s travels around different sites of the world in recent years. It includes works from different series such as those dedicated to airports, New Zealand, Turkey, Hong Kong or Japan, as well as places closer to home such as Asturias or Galicia.

Federico Granell?s painting recreates the narrative and experiential character of the journey as a detachment from routine and everyday life, as the discovery of new places and different ways of life, but also as a journey inwards, towards an encounter with oneself. In his works, a light sifted through the memory, like a photograph faded by the passage of time, takes us to those places recorded in a diffuse way in his memory. Granell does not need the camera to document his travels, he does it with his pencils or watercolours, portraying not only the place but also what only the traveller can feel.

In his works, the individual achieves a fundamental protagonism, always revealing himself wrapped in a halo of loneliness, self-absorption and nostalgia, in melancholic settings and charged with a certain mystery and unreality. These images collected in notebooks are the support of his travels, his experiences and also his fantasies. Some of them he works them later in his studio with an exquisite technique in an exercise of remembrance and idealization that provides that romantic and cinematographic dose that impregnates all his work.

Graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Salamanca in 1999, specializing in Design and Audiovisuals, and trained later in Milan and Rome, Federico Granell began his career more than a decade ago, and although painting has been his most common means of expression, he has also worked with sculpture, photography, drawing, engraving and video installation. In his words, "always with the aim of giving free rein to my concerns and exploring as many media as possible depending on the idea that concerns me at the time".

An outstanding artist on the national art scene, he has held numerous exhibitions in renowned Spanish, European and South American art galleries, has been awarded with important prizes and his works are present in prestigious collections such as that of the Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias, the Junta del Principado de Asturias or the DKV Collection.