Laurent Jiménez-Balaguer
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Laurent Jiménez-Balaguer (14 January 1928 – 16 April 2015) Born in L’Hospitalet del Llobregat, Barcelona (Catalonia), Spain. He lived and worked in Paris. During the 1950s, he was one of the most distinguished painters of Catalan art, known for creating a private language. He belonged to the Abstract Expressionism and European Informalism. These postmodern vanguardists have been characterized by their multiculturalism, manifested in their contrasting pictorial textures, and the need to invent a new mindset.
Jiménez-Balaguer’s purpose was to establish a framework of knowledge of the human psyche based on Ferdinand de Saussure’s language model, in order to show how painting is a universal medium for the understanding of the Self. He regarded the construct of the Self as indispensable, and its visualization as vital; the human inner is neither an impalpable, untouchable soul nor an invisible, immaterial ego.
His conception of creation and society involves him in a process of a permanent revolution, from which the subject must struggle for the construction of the Self.
His work asserts that the Self is a performative act. Jose María Moreno Galván in 1960 considered him one of the twenty most talented painters of Contemporary Catalan Art.
Two fundamental archetypes structure his field: the Body-Memory and the Exterior-Interior.
