ARMAND CARDONA TORRANDELL (Barcelona, 1928 - Sant Pere de Ribes, Barcelona, 1995).Untitled, 1960.Oil

ARMAND CARDONA TORRANDELL (Barcelona, 1928 - Sant Pere de Ribes, Barcelona, 1995).
Untitled, 1960.
Oil on canvas.
Signed and dated in the upper right margin.
The back shows old restoration.
Measurements: 113 x 145 cm; 116,5 x 149 cm (frame).
Armando Cardona Torrandell began to draw creating comic strips in the forties, during his adolescence, and later he studied commercial law and worked in different trades, while he trained as an artist in a self-taught way. During these years he mainly made life drawings of scenes and characters from his neighbourhood, until finally, in the 1950s, he began to paint. In 1952, during a course at the Institut del Teatre, he met the brothers Joan and Ricart Salvat i Ferré, who introduced him to the intellectual circles of the Barcelona of the time. He also discovered the marginal part of the city, adding darker, less bucolic scenes featuring delinquents, beggars and prostitutes to his usual seafaring themes. It was around this time that he decided to devote himself entirely to painting, and in 1957 he held his first exhibition at the Galeries Laietanes in Barcelona. From then on his artistic evolution would be frenetic, leaving behind his initial themes to focus on the human face and on experimentation and play with matter, volumes and textures, as will be seen in his Informalist period (1959-62). Cardona Torrandell was thus making a name for himself in the Spanish avant-garde, and in the early 1960s he began to show his work outside Catalonia, managing to earn a living from his painting, no longer under the patronage of his mother. In 1965 he began to exhibit regularly in Madrid, and that same year he carried out his first stage design project, creating the sets for "Ronda de mort a Sinera", with a text by Salvador Espriu. A year later he did the same work for "La buena persona de Sexuan", by Bertolt Brecht, directed by Ricard Salvat. It was also around this time that he began to exhibit in Italy, first at the Prima Mostra Intrarrealismo in Florence. He also collaborated with the Sitges Theatre Festival. He was associated with the Parpalló Group, and was a member of Crónica de la Realidad and Intrarealismo. In 1971 he was awarded the Ynglada-Guillot drawing prize, and in 2015 his work formed part of the exhibition "Del segon origen. Arts a Catalunya 1950-1977", held at the MNAC. His work, a plastic testimony of today's world, is characterised by variegated compositions, full of human faces, calligraphic elements and inscriptions, which define his personal iconography. He organised his work into cycles: "Retablos de la gente" (1956), "Barcas", "Máquinas" (1957), "Paisajes Concretos" (1960), "Universo concentracional" (1965), "Numancia" (1972), "Naufragios" (1979), etc. He also dedicated some of his works to Sartre, Antonio Machado, Ungaretti and Lluís Companys. Cardona Torrandell is currently represented in the Víctor Balaguer Museum in Vilanova i la Geltrú, the Vila Casas Foundation, the Rafael Zabaleta Museum and other public and private collections.