SPACE AS REVELATION

Ferran Roca Bon has a spatial wisdom only understood through the interiorization of landscapes that transform the everyday into a mysterious richness muted in solitude. The painter delves into man’s habitual places and uncovers their unpeopled and dignified yearning, their true domesticity as yet untrampled by triviality. The world of man emerges not as an appearance but as apparition, renewed, or rather, reborn from the chaotic banalities of contemporary times. This uninhabited world wielding its misanthropic hand does not repel man; the reverse, he seeks a place as of yet unreached, a place that shines and reverberates awaiting its settlers. This transfigured space unfolds its metaphysical splendor through the works of Roca Bon.

 If the labyrinthine qualities of the paintings require attentive viewing, that is because they bear little resemblance to innocent visual sophisms. Roca Bon knows well the irritable hardness of urban architecture only using these scarcely reliable materials as tools to recover from them the Idea and to restore the underlying yet heavily disguised truth of beauty.

The visual perspectives in Roca Bon’s works are events with a vitality shaken by shivers of clairvoyance: the planes meld wisely with material tenderness, walls rise like solemn processional banners, arches with philosophical curvatures, windows like urgent propositions, open streets like the flow of memory. These elements configure an orderly world that does not hide the tension raised; its revelation not merely a sentimental memory. In Roca Bon’s painting there is a remnant of the abstract defined by the illumination of the archetype; the light of transfiguration always has an element of indecisiveness and fragility, somewhat of a brittle quality.

These works are devices in the truest sense of the word. Reality itself has little importance; it is something to be overcome through a process of illumination that eliminated that which is fallacious and accidental in the perceptible world. The work then becomes invested with a critical dimension that is in no way secondary. The process of transfiguration is fundamental: it illuminates, it judges, it distinguishes, it chooses what deserves to be seen. The rest, the transitory and the deceptive, is cast off and falls away like a shell.

A painter with an exquisite sensitivity to the eternal, Roca Bon catches the brilliance of the archetype. Each of his works is an invitation to discover and to inhabit the City worthy of man, the City that is both residence and temple.