Exercitatori

The title Exercitatori is taken from the name of the first manual of methodological prayer to be edited and published in the vulgar tongue, written on Montserrat by García Jiménez de Cisneros. The basic idea: to describe the classical concept of the three ways in which, in ascending order, one can attain a life of spiritual knowledge. Cisneros uses the image of climbing a mountain as a metaphor for perfection and transmutes the individual eager for knowledge into a contemplative being. The subject of the narrative is reaching the state of contemplation (and enumerating the dangers on the way).

Lluís Hortalà. Olot, 1959. For twenty years, artist Lluís Hortalà has worked on sculpture and large-scale drawings that explore issues of perception based on orographic models. He took a keen interest in producing the London Mountains series of postcards (during his six years in London) and, in recent years, he has been fascinated by the iconography of the mountain of Everest and the rocks of Montserrat, linked to his personal experience as a climber. In these works, the artist finds new personifications to these mythical rocks through carefully prepared graphical and volumetric sessions to ‘reconstruct’ their image. In 1990, he started his series of pieces entitled ‘topologies of vision’ in wood, followed later by ceramic pieces linked to architecture, always understood as architecture of the body. His work has been exhibited at Sala Montcada (Barcelona), Fundació “la Caixa” (Barcelona), MNCARS (Madrid) and Fundação Gulbenkian (Lisbon), and he is currently preparing an extensive individual exhibition for CDAN (Huesca).