Gaspar Riera i Moragues (Estellencs, 1922 - Palma, 1993)

Gaspar Riera was the second son of Gaspar Riera Terrasa and Isabel Maria Moragues Coll, natives of the town of Estellencs, of the Serra de Tramuntana, Mallorca. He was the grandson of "carboner" (charcoal maker, who made charcoal in the mountains of holm oaks, in the "sitges"). From an early age he feels a strong attraction to drawing and watercolor. In his youth he received lessons from the Catalan painter Casimir Tarrassó, with whom he went out to paint in the fields of Mallorca. With Tarrassó he learns to use colors to fill his paintings with the light that the Catalan painter found in Mallorca. Throughout their lives they will maintain a sincere friendship. Later he will meet and become friends with the painter settled in Mallorca Joan Miró, from which he will capture the simplicity and plastic intensity and the line interpretable as childish. At the end of the 40s, in a post-war Europe, "surely encouraged by his friend Miró", he traveled to Paris in search of the emerging proposals of "the cradle of art", he interacted with painters and gallerists and returned to Paris in 1960 to exhibit at the Ros Volmar gallery in Paris, where he wants to present his own precise and elaborate style that is defined as naïf, a safe stroke of contoured motifs full of light and intense colors, with distant vanishing points that form the linear composition of the elements that make up the work. A technique apparently naive, innocent, sensitive and spontaneous, but really a technique of great precision in the drawing and audacity in the use of the palette. From then on he will expose (mainly his landscapes) in Mallorca, in Barcelona, ​​the United States and again, in Paris. He was recognized as a master of Mallorcan painting of the twentieth century, by the most important art critics on the island. Gaspar Sabater and Rafael Perelló Paradelo devoted many pages to talk about the naive painter from Mallorca, Gaspar Riera will die in Palma ten years after his good friend and teacher Joan Miró passed away.

Sources: https://www.facebook.com/Gaspar-Riera-975541405823205/, https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaspar_Riera_Moragues, http://pinturamallorca.blogspot.com/2013/11/gaspar-riera -the-intensity.html,

Sources image: https://www.facebook.com/Gaspar-Riera-975541405823205/, https://www.facebook.com/conxa.fortezabruno/media_set?set=a.2494779393896032&type=3