“As in a night in which you are torn between sleep and awakening, Xavi Ceerre’s latest paintings give off a tender aroma of an urban beach. Perhaps because he spent teenage hours in an abandoned house, on the streets of Alcoy, where he discovered the world of urban art at an early age.

Xavi Ceerre studied design at La Llotja in Barcelona, where he came to the conclusion that he did not want to spend his future locked up in an office in front of a computer. After completing a MFA in Painting in Bilbao, and appearing on television with his project on the Covid crisis, where he held a virtual exhibition in Wuhan under the title of Quarantine Gallery, he has exhibited in Germany, the United States, the Netherlands, in Bilbao and Barcelona, at the Het Hem or at Tecla Sala, among other exhibition venues, in group or individual shows.

For him painting is a constant experimentation, an exploration at the level of form and color. It is a game for adults, gestures of noble sympathy and that nod to the world of comics, in which he does not stop playing and having fun, while the viewer does. For me, he works as a sculptor would do a chopping on a digital surface, revealing gestures born in the future.

Xavi’s works rescue a vision lost on the way to adulthood. Look at things closely, get dangerously close to them, touch them. It is a continuum of previous works that are revised and repeated. An exercise that aims to take the possibilities of painting to its last consequences. In his methacrylates, Xavi Ceerre recycles fragments of old paintings, forms that are built and deconstructed and that seem to never end. He understands space in a similar way to the self-taught artist Susan Te Kahurangi King, his way of applying paint refers to that of Joe Bradley and his strokes to those of Arshile Gorky.

In what seems to be a bunker somewhere lost in Guinardó, his current workshop is a large space to design and search for that mature work that his canvases and his drawings show. In his latest creations, the color seems autumnal and, if you have imagination, some boys are talking on the edge of a Mediterranean sea.

I hope you enjoy the exhibition as much as I do.”

Text by Nacho tusquets