From a very young age, Josep Minguell Cardenyes began to travel regularly to Florence. He went to seek the roots, the origin, the protagonists of fresco painting, an artistic style that he discovered in the work of his grandfather and his father. Both painted as he does now, directly on the walls of architectural spaces, civil buildings, sacred constructions, palaces and temples in which life is given by applying natural materials and colors. Lime and sand mortar, pigments, brushes, water, sketches, tools and scaffolding accompany a fresco painter in his work of granting the wall its last skin.
Decisively and quickly, the artist applies beautiful pigments dissolved in water directly to the wall, when the mortar is still wet. The carbonation process of the lime will fix the pigments, resulting in a matte and water-insoluble paint, resistant, of pure pigments, of great chromatic intensity, transparent and opaque, incomparable to any other procedure. Josep Minguell is one of the few artists in the world who works with this millenary technique, in which painting is the expression of space, the walls tell a story through the artist.
Thanks to the brushes of fresco painters, a city like Florence is visited every year by millions of people who walk slowly, looking up to admire the ceilings and walls, contemplating so much beauty with open mouths. These were works painted between the 13th and 15th centuries, but Josep Minguell, today, paints in the same way as those artists of the Florentine Renaissance did.
In 2008, Minguell obtained his doctorate in Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona, defending the thesis that led to the book Fresco Mural Painting: The Strategies of Painters. Now he has another work ready for publication, to which he has dedicated all his senses: Florence and the Fresco Painters. Fresco mural painting has shaped the professional career of this artist, with pictorial practice and research, which still today take him to El Prat airport to catch a flight to Tuscany.
The last time he was there, last May, it was to revive the Renaissance for the residents of Castelfiorentino, a town in the metropolitan area of Florence. Josep Minguell was chosen to redecorate with fresco murals the tabernacle of the Visitation in this Italian town, which in 1491 had been made by the Italian Renaissance artist Benozzo Gozzoli. Gozzoli's original frescoes were removed in the late sixties of the last century with the strappo technique, which allows mural paintings to be extracted for transfer and preservation, in this case, in the museum that the town of Castelfiorentino has dedicated to Benozzo Gozzoli.
This spring, 530 years after Gozzoli showcased his pictorial style, Minguell, who is one of the few artists worldwide specialized in fresco mural painting, has recreated the same motifs inspired by the original paintings, which depict solitude, the comfort of nature, and the return with loved ones through the story of Giacchino, who was expelled from his community, as explained in the Protoevangelium of James.
Minguell has reinterpreted those scenes that Gozzoli originally painted, without spatial obstacles and with ocher and oxide colors. He did it with the tabernacle doors open, making it easy for the townspeople to come and watch him work. "They would come to greet me, and offer me drinks and food, and invite me to parties," explains Josep Minguell, commenting that "this only happens in towns of a certain human dimension." Happy, he says, "to have been able to work as fresco painting is really worked, with open doors. There, people have been able to dream with Gozzoli every day. For them, it has been like traveling to the past of an important part of their history."
In Castelfiorentino, the Catalan artist ---who, when not traveling, lives in Barcelona or Tàrrega, his hometown---, worked every day for two weeks. "The most magical thing about fresco happened, where painting becomes part of the buildings with its form, and of the people, because of the history that connects with the environment, nature, the landscape, the mountains, which always mark the character and feelings of people. For all this, we say that fresco painting is a painting with roots".
Minguell's work, now finished, can be seen in the tabernacle of the Visitation in the Tuscan town until the end of the year, when the new frescoes are also expected to be removed and exhibited in an itinerary through several museums in Catalonia, yet to be specified.
In Catalan lands, Minguell has painted about fifty architectural ensembles, among which stands out that of the church of Santa Maria de l'Alba in Tàrrega, where a pictorial surface of just over a thousand square meters inevitably leads one to think of it as the Sistine Chapel of Catalonia. It is one of the largest contemporary fresco murals.
Frescoes in Barcelona
In Barcelona, Josep Minguell made the frescoes of the church of Mare de Déu del Port. He wanted to capture in it "the longing for the sea," he says. And he explains: "The industrial port and the coastal ring road cut off access to the sea for the people of this neighborhood, where the church has always been a structuring element, because it cared for the schooling and health of its people. In the painting, I wanted to give them back the sea, symbolically." He did it "by painting the nave of the church as a boat and, in the presbytery, you can see how the boat arrives in Barcelona." You can see the Zona Franca neighborhood, Montjuïc mountain, and a large body of water.
In Sant Joan Despí, an entire side wall of the church of Mare de Déu del Carme was granted to him to recreate, in addition to the mysteries of the gospel, scenes that speak of the life of the people of the neighborhood. In this case, he explains, "I made the Carmel mountain, which is where the Virgin of Carme is venerated. It is a mythical mound that connects earth with heaven and is full of paths." With this, Minguell shows how people arrived from all over to the Sant Joan Despí neighborhood.
But, in Barcelona, Minguell tells us, there are other frescoes by other authors. And he cites some of them: in the baroque church of Sant Pere Nolasc, in Plaça Castella, for example, we find frescoes. Also in the Palau de la Generalitat, a work by Joaquim Torres García, which he could not finish. We can also see them in the Correos building, on Via Laietana, near the port, "where there is a splendid Novecentista representation", and in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, (MNAC), we can see the frescoes representing the Pantocrator, extracted from the central apse of the Romanesque church of San Climent de Taüll.
Now, Minguell is preparing new projects, in this case, in China. Always hand in hand with fresco painting, which he knows "is like going against the current. I do it because it is a connection of myself with matter, with the earth, through pigments, and this is an exercise in absolute freedom," expresses the artist, who grew up living with art at home and who was recently admitted to the Reial Acadèmia Catalana de Belles Arts. Minguell has given master classes on fresco painting at the Universitat de Barcelona and at the Accademia di belle arti di Carrara, in Italy, among other places. He considers fresco "more than a technique, a way of understanding art and painting that is projected directly onto architecture in the eyes, with colors, all mineral, the painting connects in a special way with the colors of nature."
He saw his father on scaffolding painting the side frescoes of the church in his town, Tàrrega, which he later completed to make us travel to the domes of Italy that exalt Renaissance beauty. Among clouds, flying from Florence to Barcelona and vice versa, he has been enriched with information he has sought, in a meticulous research task, about everything he could find on the life and work, the daily life and the know-how of the Florentine fresco painters, his references, and of whom he now tells us and shows us the technique that all of them learned to master.