Alberto Zanchetta


At the turn of the third millennium, the Novecento abstraction seemed to have to fall asleep on a pillow, a pillow of inert sleep; but more than yawning we can speak of vagaries, those of a resurrection, or perhaps we should say insurrection because his is a strenuous resistance to the anticlimax of the contemporary. Rather than “being reborn in figure”, the aniconic accepts to be reborn in potentia, finding himself inevitably surrounded by a void endowed with meaning, the ideal space to build an architecture of shapes and colours. A nothing that we could compare to the desert, defined by Islamic mysticism as a place where injustice does not reign, a place of encounters, temptations, revelations. Beware of luciferine appearances and counterappearances, even Malevic was attracted by the non-objectivity “in the desert where nothing is real except what you feel”. Moving from a natural landscape to a neutral space, the non-loci imposes on the work and the artist a transcendental relationship with the world, nourishing the hope of switching – according to self-gratifying specificities – nothing in everything.


The infigurability of Joan Saló Armengol adopts flat geometry and a primary sign, values The use of ballpoint pens in an attempt to rewrite/redefine the texture of the canvas by color. The lattice structure, which we could equate to a sponge, is expands and is absorbed within the pictorial surface; similar to the human brain is instead of the level of understanding of the extra-object image. The artist speaks in fact of a “mental code” that (able to highlight the connections between the hand and the head, over that between the rhythm of the sign and its temporal course) develops a complex network of meanings. The individual works can therefore refer to the textures of the fabrics as well as to digital forms or micro-processed natural structures. But although connected to each other, the vectors of meaning have neither a true beginning nor a true end, then the empty arguments decay in favour of the possibilities offered by the medium – which is also a method based on repetition and obsession.


In Joan Saló Armengol’s images, the abstract motif reconciles the decoration, the meditation and reflection, giving shape to a “thing itself” that only for condescension would agree to be compared to a seismic pattern or a dripping of colors, not was more to sprinkle that desert that looks more and more like a volcanic oasis.