‘Mediterrani Atlàntic’

Tramuntana

Living Ashes

In early July 2026, around 2,300 hectares of the Gavarres massif burned. After the fire, the artist Francesc Ruiz Abad walked through the disaster zone near Romanyà de la Selva and gathered charred remains of holm oak and heather. With that inert ash, with those dry vestiges that once grew full of living sap and that for a few days blazed with the fury of the flames, he drew part of the pieces made specifically for the exhibition Mediterrani Atlàntic at Tramuntana Gallery, in Vulpellac. The result, however, is not confined to testimony. Nor to narrative.

On one hand, because the ash of the Gavarres is more than mere matter. It cannot be reduced to the sooty residue of combustion, full stop. Ash is the trace of death. It is the metaphor of devastation. That is why the blacks and greys of any ash evoke shadows as deep as those of Pompeii, Hiroshima or the World Trade Center. Any ash is all ashes, and by virtue of its triple dimension as matter, trace and metaphor, it plunges us into the leaden weight of annihilation. On the other, because ash, in the hands of a creator like Francesc Ruiz Abad, recovers the capacity to give life. Thus, from the charred trees, through the power of art, a new reality emerges, one that stirs interior movements in viewers open to aesthetic experience. It is no surprise that Juan Eduardo Cirlot, art critic, mythologist, composer and, above all, poet, recalled in his inspiring Diccionario de símbolos (1968) the relationship between ash and the nigredo, the blackening phase of decomposition that opens the alchemical process of spiritual perfection.

And it is precisely here that art introduces a possibility of transformation so hard to see in catastrophe alone. Even though it begins to turn green again in very little time — such is the force and urgency of life — the forest will take a long time to be renewed. Artists do not settle for the world and its events. They recreate them, they expand them, to offer ways out and alternatives. Thus, the arboreal remains gathered in the Gavarres grow again. At the same time, they cease to belong exclusively to the burned landscape and enter into dialogue with that other Atlantic panorama that Francesc Ruiz Abad also traverses with body and mind.

Indeed, in this painter’s work one always observes a kind of natural reverence for life and its evolution, far removed from imposed rituals or commonplaces. Francesc Ruiz Abad’s work is distinctive in every respect: from his research into materials and processes to the development of his own iconographies, by way of the importance of travel. His approach to the dynamic state and the energy that is life has very little to do with the festive, often naïve, effusions of those who remain on the surface. The Palamós-born artist creates from a deep respect for the atavistic force that pulses through dense jungle thickets, in the waves of the sea, in animals that become symbols. Also from eclecticism, curiosity and fascination with all those faces that still gesture in the marginalia of ancient books, in capitals, in the bestiaries of popular festivals, in the painting of the great masters of contemporaneity, in cartoons…

For all this, Francesc Ruiz Abad shares the conceptual richness of an exhibition such as Mediterrani Atlàntic with surprising austerity. His understanding of the cycles of generation and destruction demands balancing the formal exuberance of highly elaborate graphic work with a severe chromatic economy, as rigorous as prayer within a cell. This is the sobriety of the ascetic who walks barefoot along the beaches here and along those other, far more distant ones, who makes his way among trees consumed by fire, who wanders beneath the sculptures of cloisters. And who offers up his chest, gleaming ultramarine blue, to the blackness of engraved smoke. Blue and black — very black, in this show — as with poetry, only much can be said with very little. What skill, what density, for so young a creator (born in 1990). What beauty, what nuances, in a body of work that, for all its intensely personal character, springs not from the demands of ego but from generosity toward audiences who must complete it with their own intelligence and sensibility. Is it not, after all, another’s gaze and memory that, since the most remote antiquity, gives meaning to cinerary urns?

Pere Parramon,
PhD in Art History, critic, professor and writer

Additional information:

Dates: 5 September – 5 November 2026
Address: Carrer dels Arboços 10, 17111 Vulpellac, Girona
Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10 am–2 pm and 4.30 pm–8.30 pm.
Telephone: (+34) 643 695 663
Email: info@tramuntanagallery.com
Website: tramuntanagallery.com