XAVIER GUAL
Bio
Xavier Gual is an artist born in Terrassa (Barcelona, Spain) in 1958. He began his training in Fine Arts in Barcelona, but soon understood that his education needed to extend beyond the academic framework. He left university to embark on a long journey along the Silk Road, in the context of the hippie movement, at a time when the search for freedom, spirituality, and lived experience defined an entire generation.
During this journey through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, he developed his first bodies of work and began exhibiting professionally. Conceived as a process of self-discovery, the journey also included a period of excess and drug dependency that became a decisive turning point, ultimately leading him back to Spain. This extreme experience profoundly shaped his artistic gaze and his relationship with matter, time, and silence.
The influence of these territories is central to his visual language. In Iran, the relationship between architecture, geometry, and spirituality revealed to him the value of emptiness; in Afghanistan, the ochres and reddish tones of the earth became organically embedded in his palette; in Pakistan, the rhythm of everyday life transformed his perception of time; and in India, the marine horizon of Goa acted as both synthesis and closure of this formative stage.
After a period of distance from the art world, for the past eleven years he has lived and worked in Els Castells, where his studio is located—a small settlement within the Boumort National Hunting Reserve , in the Pre-Pyrenees. For much of the year he is its sole inhabitant. This voluntary retreat has powerfully reoriented his practice toward concentration, austerity, and a direct relationship with the landscape.
His work is articulated through a gestural, material abstraction that does not seek to represent form, but rather the energy of territory and the memory of the journey. Layers, textures, and earthy pigments configure surfaces that function as transitional spaces between the physical and the spiritual. Each work presents itself as a territory in its own right: an inner landscape where experience, matter, and silence converge.
Statement
My work originates in movement. Painting is, for me, a way of travelling and remembering—a process through which lived experience is translated into matter, colour, and gesture. I am not interested in representing the visible world, but in capturing what runs through it: its latent energy, the pulse of places, and the traces that time, movement, and silence leave in memory.
For many years I travelled across different territories along the Silk Road. Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India not only transformed the way I look, but also the way I work. From these landscapes I learned the value of earth, dust, geometry, emptiness, and contemplation. Each place revealed that space is not filled with forms, but with resonances.
My painting is built through layers, textures, and pigments that emerge in an almost organic manner. I approach the canvas as a territory, allowing the gesture to advance, pause, overlap, and enter into dialogue with silence. Colour is never decorative; it is memory, temperature, and sedimented time. The earthy and reddish tones that recur in my work—present as well in the landscape where I now work—echo both the paths once travelled and my current surroundings, where the soil reactivates the memory of those distant places.
Abstraction is, for me, a space of freedom and synthesis. Within it, I find the possibility of connecting the material and the spiritual, the lived and the intuitive. Each work is conceived as a suspended journey, an inner map where landscapes, cultures, and experiences converge. I paint in order to keep moving, to listen to what remains when everything else has shifted, and to transform memory into presence.
Exhibitions & Collections
2026 - ARS Foundation - Artist selected for the ARS Talens 2026 program (Geneva, Switzerland)
2015 - He opens his studio in the village of Els Castells (Lleida, Spain)
2013 - Museu Raset - Permanent collection - Bueler-Bernard Family Collection (Girona, Spain)
1998 - Group exhibition "La Miranda Multiple" (Girona, Spain)
1985 - Fundacion Caixa Terrassa - Permanent collection (Terrassa, Spain)
1984 - Group exhibition 4th Biennal Barcelona Contemporary Art (Barcelona, Spain)
1983 - Individual exhibition Els Amics de les Arts
1976 - Group exhibition Els Amics de les Arts
