Jordi Fornies’s work is imbued with the robust colours of his native Barcelona .  Mediterranean brightness is brought to Dublin in the grenadine and orange blush of Margarita & Bloody Mary’s Day with Two Friends in Sunny Dublin, and the vivid polka-dot fizz of Crazy Parties. But this is not merely multi-coloured whimsy.  225 Fishes, made for an art competition in Sitges, suggests the dark depths of ocean as experienced by divers looking up towards the light of the surface. And many of the paintings explore the depths of emotional experience. 

10 Remembered Emotions brings a Buddhist perspective to bear on a time of turmoil, while Just Seven Years of Autobiography is a visual diary of the artist’s feelings in a key period of his life. Fornies trained as a chemist but here he is an alchemist – transforming shadowy, elusive moods into visible, glowing form.

  The artist has been living in Ireland for the past three years, a sojourn that has fed his artistic imagination and produced such meditations as The Knowing Sea and The Green Island .

   His interest in chemistry and the combination and interaction of different elements has influenced him in terms of both form and content, and allowed him to experiment with materials in a way that enhances the depth and complexity of his work. These can include something as ancient as papyrus and as modern as latex - the traditional and the contemporary mixed and balanced.

  These are evocative paintings. Fairy Tale, with its enchanted forest of lollipop-coloured trees, was created for a child but resonates with adults too. The Jealous 5%, also called The Passion, has a slightly sinister power, with its texture of skin and its hints of crucifixion, and medieval torture chambers - a Spanish inquisition of a more modern kind.

  Catalonia has a proud tradition of modern art – it gave us Gaudi, Dali and Miro. Picasso was trained there. And Antoni Tapies still works in Barcelona .  Fornies’s work has echoes of these venerable antecedents – they influence by osmosis if nothing else – but is a product of his own explorations and experiments, exuberant and subtle, playful and profound.

Cathy Dillon
Irish Times journalist