For some people, their life is set from the start, while others have to earn everything by using their strength, tenacity, knowledge and talent, acquired over the years. If we apply this to art, it gets more complicated, because skills and wit can play a decisive role in an artist’s career, for better or for worse. The artist I wish to talk about is one of those who have earned everything thanks to his unbeatable commitment. 

But I would not like to use «earned» —mentioned earlier— in the sense that concerns everybody nowadays, especially with art. Andreu Maimó’s earnings belong to another category. We could say that it is about his achievements and the enhancement of his qualities as a great artist, which had resisted him for some time. 

In a similar situation, many others have abandoned their artistic tools, and we will never know whether or not they had a hidden artist in their souls. Andreu Maimó, who at a very young age began to master this craft —or crafts—, realised that to be an artist one needs to know more than just painting, ceramics, sculpture, engraving, lithograph, xylography…

Sometimes, hard-won things come to us with great simplicity. Such are Andreu Maimó’s works; simple, profound, with an immense capacity to suggest things that would not have moved us if they were obvious. What is his secret? I would say that the key to his art has to do with his infinite capacity to observe, to look so intensely at things that, in the end, they are surrounded by a metaphysical aura —often releasing dramatic echoes that are revealed like a voice-over. He painted vines that evoke the uprooting tragedy of a lifetime, from start to finish. Rotting fruit that allude to the passage of time (without the high-flown images that try to hide the clichés of the bunch); and stalks that are very close to dessert grapes or wine grapes, with the same nobility as their own past of flavours and aromas. Andreu Maimó: the clarity of his gaze makes all things poetic. On canvas, ceramics, sculpture, graphic work —truly worthy of being admired and collected— his world unfolds in a tense stillness, in an atmosphere where everything is flooded by light and pulsates peacefully. Readers may allow me to be frivolous —all art classifications are frivolous— by saying Andreu Maimó’s work has been, for me, one of the most important discoveries of the last few years. And I like to think that many people can now approach this artist’s world and make it their own in thought.

Guillem Frontera
ULTIMA HORA 2008