An impressionistic gaze that looks with half-closed eyes, just like the distant view that pleases artists: It blurs the flaws of details and allows one to appreciate the whole picture upon which we imprint our own emphases.
Friederic Niezsche
We knew almost nothing about Magda Folch as an artist, because although she was very open with her students, she was personally very reserved. She taught us how to see, and not to confuse what we know with what we see, and she conveyed to us a way of observing, through her gaze. As her student at the former School of Art of the Diputació de Tarragona, today the Museum of Modern Art, I had the fortune to know some of her works from recent years; they still seem masterful to me today.
As we have discovered works from different periods of her career, her evolution has become evident. Born in Reus in 1903, she began drawing and painting with academic practice, common in art schools at the beginning of the last century, later approaching symbolism, influenced by the “Escola de Figueres” (Figueres School), which was driven by Josep Puig Pujades and Salvador Dalí. Paintings and drawings, which I have called “precious,” in which the study of volumes and the density of each painted element becomes evident. Gradually, the academic siennas gave way to nuanced, fresh, and vital greens, Lorquian greens that seem to pulsate amidst increasingly daring color gradations. It was from her stay in Ibiza in the sixties that everything around her burst into light and agility: “As if I had taken off a winter coat,” Magda said.
She shifted from focusing on the entire work to doing so exclusively on strategic points. She often creates large planes that, being perfectly integrated, are not overly evident, which bring her work closer to more radical movements. This means that certain works are not as far removed from the prevailing trends of their creation period as might appear at first glance.
Hers is a very personal concept of Impressionism, if you will, late, or as it is also often said, out of its time. An extraordinary portrait painter, among the painted subjects, whether commissioned, friends, or family, some slipped in who belonged to marginalized worlds; she also cultivated floral motifs with a high level of treatment, still life, which often includes everyday and domestic elements, and landscape. In her portraits, the presence of the subject transcends to the point that it seems to place us before an unsettling sphinx. Her pure line drawings, which Arnau Puig calls “calligraphic,” are of great subtlety and undeniable mastery.
The Museum of Modern Art of the Diputació de Tarragona and the Museum of Reus present two simultaneous exhibitions, and a book from the Tamarit collection: “Magda Folch, The Impressionist Gaze,” with a prologue by Daniel Giralt-Miracle and José Corredor Matheos, with a text authored by me, and the biography by Carme Puyol, published by Viena Editorial. This is the result of a research and investigation proposal and the culmination of more than two years of work.
Magda Folch, artist, teacher, mother, and wife of Philosophy Professor Emili Donato, lived in a time that, while complicated for everyone, was more challenging for those defeated in a civil war and during that long dictatorship. A time when the mere fact of being a woman was a stigma in the male-dominated world of plastic arts. The artist expresses this without reservation in some of the interviews published in the media, conducted during her exhibitions in Barcelona.
The Museum of Modern Art celebrates the 40th anniversary of its founding with a series of exhibitions dedicated to women artists: “Femení plural” (Feminine Plural), of which this exhibition is the first. A selection of Magda Folch’s works that we have deemed essential. Technique and passion, not a manner or formula, and a gaze that remains an enigma connecting us with the painting of all times.
Josep Maria Rosselló
Title of the attached illustration: “Anna Lying on the Green Sofa”
Opening of the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of the Diputació de Tarragona, on March 10, 2016.
Opening at the Museum of Reus, on March 11, 2016.
