Join us on VOLTA Visits, a recurring series where we spend studio time with VOLTA exhibiting artists and learn more about their background, process, and projects.

The Majorcan artist Rafel Bestard lives in Sa Casa Blanca, 20 minutes outside Palma, in an old farmhouse his family bought about 65 years ago. The foundation of the farm “Can Moran” though might date back to the first millennium.

Embedded behind thick walls of the historic house, light shines through a roof hatch into his studio in his backyard. The air smells like fresh oil paint. In a rather dark area in his studio, illuminated by a bright spotlight, stands a painting in progress on an easel.

Rafel’s figurative oil paintings reveal intimate moments: a portrait of a person alone in a room or two individuals close to each other, lost in reverie. His paintings capture emotions, some obvious to read, some disturbing, but always graceful and soft. They flow in between reality and surreality, between awakening and dreaming, trying to make the invisible visible.

Rafel’s color palette and painting method references Renaissance paintings as well as Impressionistic influences. Up close, they only show brushstrokes, but from a distance these brushstrokes turn into forms.

The starting point for his painting is a photograph. He takes pictures of people he has a personal relationship with, or models and dancers he has been working with for several years, staging moments and emotions that he recreates in his paintings. After the photo session, he edits the digital image with a filter to boost the contrast and color transition, as well as the outline of the portrait he intends to paint.

The oil paint itself is key in Rafel’s production. He creates his own pigments, collecting soil and stones during long hikes, grinding them into powder and mixing it with oil. His color palette reflects those warm earth tones of brown, grey, ochre, and dark red.

He creates his own white paint that reappears in all his paintings. By utilizing lead as the basic element, the process is effectively toxic, yet it is essential for him to make and use this all-covering white to internalize his paintings.

Each work carries its own footprint. The act of painting takes just few days and, to him, is only a minor part of the entire process. Rafel doesn’t focus on the outcome of his painting but rather on the moment of producing, the flow of creating and willing to own each part of it.

“The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error, so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and from what he and they are to be, is only a negation. This is man.”

⁠— Charles Sanders Peirce

Rafel investigates emotions, the quality of feelings. He dissects what human beings can experience and feel, what is common and universal to everyone. Through his paintings, these emotions are transferred into shapes and forms, with the intention to resonate in the painting’s observer. He says that, if we do not share these emotions as they emerge outside ourselves, we become dead matter. We are made of the same structure as iron and platinum, but we distinguish ourselves through the space between our atoms, the same space where our emotions are memorized. Thus, sharing emotions is essential.

Rafel Bestard is presented by Galeria Contrast in Barcelona and they have been collaborating since more than a decade. For VOLTA’s September Edition, Rafel will create a new set of paintings. A video documentary about his performative process of painting is scheduled to be released in the fall. While the video footage was created, he painted outside his studio for the first time, incorporating new pigments from a different environment, giving his color palette a new golden gleam.

RAFEL BESTARD
Born 1967 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Lives and works in Sa Casa Blanca, Mallorca

Education

2009–2012 Drawing professor at ESADIB, Palma de Mallorca
1990 Degree in Fine Arts at University of Barcelona

Awards

2018 Artist-In-Residence in RiddergadeAIR, Viborg Kunsthal, Denmark

Recent Solo Exhibitions (selection)

2020 Rafel Bestard, Galerie Mokum, Amsterdam
2019 Rafel Bestard, Galerie Heissingsart, Berlin
2019 Man or Rabbit, Galeria Contrast, Barcelona
2018 Infamous angel, Can Gelabert, Binissalem
2018 We the souls, Kirk Gallery, Aalborg
2015 To touch a sore spot, Galeria Contrast, Barcelona
2014 Rafel Bestard. Malerei, Galerie Heissingsart, Lübeck