Judith Gangolells: the essential spaces for breathing

The artwork of Judith Gangolells (Barcelona, 1976) is a hazy, intimate, almost weightless invitation to strike up a dialogue with objects.

"I love all things, not just the loftiest ones, but the infinitely small, the thimble, the spurs, the plates, the flower vases", writes Neruda in his Oda a las cosas. And it is precisely among those everyday things, the most basic, the most sincere, that we can establish a true intimate dialogue with our own existence. Telling us their stories without speaking, in the subtlety of what is there around us, forms wait for us, going unnoticed until we decide to talk to them. Forms that take shape in the reality of unpretentious objects, that live among the beats of the alphabet of old typewriters, that prop up bicycles unable to stay upright once nobody is riding them any more.

Judith Gangolells, possibly influenced by her profession as an engineer, cuts through that surface layer that covers things and gives them character, and then goes further, establishing her intimate connections with the realities underneath. Through an artistic process based on transparencies, Gangolells tries to seduce us, to draw our attention to those stories, those captivating confessions that objects want to reveal to us when we are willing to listen to them beneath the cloths that cover them.

And the artist hands us one of the keys with her oils, full of the dense, dribbling colour of turpentine and oils. To slide towards those introspective worlds, to get inside them, you have to lubricate the canvases, but above all you have to respect the spaces that are essential for breathing. And her artwork inhales and exhales within the composition, filling it with air, the sustenance and the vehicle that carries the message.

After twelve years of study at the Escuela de Arte de Esplugues de Llobregat, where Judith Gangolells laid her artistic foundations, the painter has shown her artwork publicly in numerous exhibitions and art fairs since 2009. Among them, the ones at la Candelera in Molins de Rei stand out, along with others held in Pallejà, a town that has inspired some of her artworks and with which the artist has a close relationship. Judith Gangolells has also won numerous prizes in quick painting competitions such as the ones in Vilanova del Camí (2014) and Pallejà (2010 and 2014), as well as in dry painting competitions like those in Cervelló (2012, 2013, 2014) and Sant Joan Despí (2014).

You can find out more about Judith Gangolells and her artwork here.