Metaphor – Jordi Forniés

 In 2007, Jordi Forniés’s exhibition MagicLogic brought the vivid colours of Barcelona to Dame Street. Less than a year later, his agent Olivier and I, travel to his beach house in Co Meath to see his latest work.

 His windows open onto the gleaming sea, a view that inspired the stormy green and blue mood of Broken Silence. The changing Irish weather is also captured – this time playfully - in Grian na hÉireann, but Jordi’s native Spain is also still a source of inspiration. Propped against his living-room wall is The Secret Promise, which captures the ochre light of an Andalusian evening, the grizzled beauty of an ancient olive tree – shades of the Old Masters emerging through the artist’s contemporary practice.

 Old and new are combined throughout the work: hand-mixed pigments, gold and copper leaf and even papyrus are cross-layered with modern compounds such as latex and plastic. As before, Jordi’s training as a chemist has given him the confidence to experiment fearlessly with materials. This is perhaps most vividly demonstrated in A Poem, in which columns of Chinese characters painted on wood are evoked, with, among other things, squares of transparent plastic.

 There is a new subtlety of both colour and form in these paintings, but the artist’s openness and his willingness to document his emotional experiences on canvas is still evident. An unexpected side-track on life’s path is evoked in oxidised gold slabs in Here to There, the crepuscular joys of a brief love affair mapped out in seven blocks of indigo and pearl in Wonderful Week.

 Of course, despite this candour and the skill in its expression, there is still, always, something unknown – we can never fully enter another’s interior world. Visual metaphors, like verbal metaphors, are illuminating but they are still just metaphors. Paradoxically, its sense of what remains unrevealed is another appealing element in this complex art that is at once sensual and atmospheric, accessible and enigmatic.

 As we leave the sea is drawing in, enveloping the shining beach in its tender, mysterious embrace.

Cathy Dillon
Irish Times Journalist
August 2008