En blanc i negre | Joaquim Chancho

Ana Mas Projects is pleased to present in its space of l’Hospitalet EN BLANC I NEGRE, an individual exhibition of Joaquim Chancho that brings together a selection of his works in black and white from the beginning of his artistic production to the present.

The beginning of his career in the 70s represents a very productive and highly active stage for the author, which focuses on a methodical search that takes geometry as a basis, exploring the space, composition, tonal relationships, luminosity and vibration. In those years, Chancho works with the simplest elements, reducing the color to white and black, and using mainly horizontal and vertical lines. In the 80s, he incorporates paper as a support, including in his process the error and the accident, aspects that will lead him to unfold with greater freedom in his work on canvas. In recent years, he has progressively focused on the surface of the painting as pure abstraction. Chancho brings us closer to painting in its most refined state: the line as a sign and color as an intense and essential vibration. The result of this juxtaposition sometimes brings us closer to the visual fields of stillness and silence and, sometimes, to clearly expressive tensions.

For EN BLANC I NEGRE, Ana Mas Projects brings together a series of works between 1972 and 2017, some of which have not been shown in four decades. A show where works on paper in which the gesture, similar to the writing process, are interrelated with a succession of paintings that bring us closer to the thinking of Chancho in the different stages of his work. In the selection of these works, the chromatism is reduced to its minimum expression, and the formal and conceptual commitment with geometry prevails.

Joaquim Chancho (Tarragona, Spain, 1943) develops his artistic work since the seventies, first in the interpolation of the gesture to geometry and, later on, making successive sequences that incorporate signs and calligraphic elements. His long career, always on the fringes of the schools and the artistic movements that were happening in the Spanish art scene, has made him one of the most influential abstract artists in Spain, with a very personal creation and unity.
The work of Chancho is part of important national and international collections, among which we highlight the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the MACBA, the Juan March Foundation in Madrid, the Atlantic Center for Contemporary Art in Las Palmas and the La Caixa Foundation in Barcelona.