Nunca es suficiente

Miquel Mont was one of the artists who came to Josep Suñol’s attention in the early 1990s, when the collector was particularly interested in emerging artists working outside the official art circuits. It didn’t take long for Mont’s work—with its focus on the analytic side to painting—to join the collection.

His later works—including the selection of pieces on display in the show Nunca es suficiente —expand in surface area and merge with the space. In the Lapsus series pieces, he decouples painting and medium; geometrical figures with human proportions, made out of industrial materials (plasterboard, MDF, cardboard, etc), are presented alongside similar-sized surfaces painted onto the wall. In these pieces, painting takes on a life of its own and breaks free from its supporting base to move directly onto the walls in the exhibition spaces. The industrial materials that characterise Mont’s work are openly displayed in all their primitive, economical splendour.

In the Coopérations series, the artist’s gesture is at the fore. Paint strokes, affixed pieces of paper and other superposed materials force our attention onto each and every layer in the creative process.

Forms devoid of content—Miquel Mont’s own words—are what we find in the Mono–Tones, constructions that include metal frames, wooden pedestals and black-and-white printed images selected to ensure their content won’t steal the show.

Finally, the Collages idéologiques are packed full of content, but what kind of content? Miquel Mont plays with their ambiguous ideological and material burden and leaves spectators no choice but to become an indispensible part of the work themselves.