Joan ILL at Galerie Tanit
Galerie Tanit presents Mittelmeer, Joan ILL’s solo exhibition. ILL’s work is focused on exploring the limits of painting, with a particular emphasis on transparency. He uses textures and transparencies to manifest the telluric link between his work and his territory. His work is characterized by a desire to maintain the focus on the contrast of textures and his idea of territory, and he often innovates in new formats and various plans that coexist in the same pictorial space.
“Joan ILL’s work implies reflexive revision of the concept of painting, questioning its limits while at the same time investigating and delving into its intrinsic possibilities and revealing its less evident side. He disrupts the usual perception of space and matter, turns the pictorial language upside down and offers us that which is usually hidden, the back room of the show.
His works manifest a marked sense of balance, expressive restraint and sobriety. He’s not satisfied with the obvious, yet he expresses himself with a meridian clarity that affects both form and content.
Always within the admirable sense of coherence that shows throughout his career, his recent production shows a splendid maturity, an increasingly subtle and refined use of his characteristic tools: transparency, hybridization with the photographic language, the combination of the manual with the technological… so that he manages, -especially in his diptychs and triptychs- to transmit, to communicate something new, a deep sense of purity, an atmosphere impregnated with spirituality and transcendence.” – AICA member Raquel Medina de Vargas
About The Artist
180 x 125 x 6 cm
Joan ILL is a painter, installation artist, and video artist born in Vilanova i la Geltrú, Spain in 1954. He currently lives and works between Barcelona and Camp de Tarragona. ILL began painting in the 1980s, after studying art and interior design at the School of Arts and Crafts in Barcelona. He identified with the informalist trend and opted for a pictorial line of large formats close to the neo-expressionism of the time. Between 1988 and 2001, he lived in Paris, where he developed part of his artistic career. It was at this time that he focused his interest on a concrete painting based on a rigorous expressive austerity.
ILL has produced several series throughout his career, including Sacralis (2017), Mediterran, Our Sea, Natura Morta, Disseminat, Gentilly, 3.6.9 (1993-1996), and Paradisos Perduts (1997-2003). He has also worked with installations, often site-specific, that combine materials from nature or from the territory and different techniques such as light, sound, printing on canvas or video.
ILL has collaborated with several institutions, museums, and galleries both nationally and internationally, participating in fairs such as ARCO Madrid, Arte Cologne, KunstRai Amsterdam, LOOP Barcelona, Beirut Art Fair, among others. His work is part of public and private collections both nationally and internationally.
Mittelmeer, Joan ILL
Location: Reisingerstraße 6 Rgb 80337 München
Duration: March 16 – May 6, 2023