CERCLE 6

Passion and coherence Meritorious member of the Reial Cercle Artístic de Barcelona A la pàgina oposada / En la página opuesta / On the opposite page Teresa Llàcer. 2012. Foto cortesia / Photo by courtesy Teresa Llàcer f She has beautiful eyes and her gaze is already seeking to break the ice. She gives the impression that the whole universe fits in a single glance of hers and through it, one imagines how great its small world could have been from the perspective of a woman so bold and clear. I forget what I was trying to ask and I choose to let myself be guided. After all, many writers have, with precision and good prose, written on her work and have been able to put it in its rightful place. I am much more interested in the person and, as the morning passes, there aren't enough hours to fit in everything we want to say. She has known how to get the most out of everything she has lived through because, in an incredibly lucid and respectful way, she revisits some of the hardest episodes of her life without her sweet and comforting smile leaving her face for a single moment. Faced with what she considers to be wrong, she invites change, reflection, without irascibility but with weight and common sense, and leaves a clear record of all this in her works. A woman who has raised freedom from the silence of her deep introspection, who has managed to correct and move forward without contemplations, and who has made objection and integrity her own banner. She seems to be impregnated with a halo of integrity in the face of adversity, and of striving for life, for the exalted, for the most tender, for the most accurate things in life. And art is her life, because that is how it is shown to me. Her works bear faithful witness to what she has lived, and how she has done it, and that seems to me the most irreproachable thing I have heard in a long time from the lips of an artist. She understands and contemporizes, but remains firm in her convictions, which she defends with veteran wisdom, such as when defending the validity of drawing, omnipresent in all her work and her first attempt at combining the tangible and the intangible. It is - or at least it seems to me - part of the essence of the artist, who confesses that she has always drawn and that is with drawing, as the soul and support of the original idea, that she says she feels somehow indebted to. That is why she pays such attention to printing. She shows me her workshop, captivating and luminous, full of color and traces of the passing of people, of moments told or yet to be, of barely broken silences. A stur- dy, well-groomed cat falls asleep on a rocking chair in the sun and barely notices the presence of a stranger. She is preparing the prints to give to her relatives at parties, with a new encrypted message intended to get a different reaction from each re- cipient. Receiving it has given me a huge smile because I remembered our meeting and that charming residence that provides shelter to the passions, lived or yet to be lived, of Teresa Llàcer; a friendly house where the sun shines even on cloudy days and where everything acquires meaning at the very moment it needs to. █ B orn in Mont-roig del Camp (Tarragona), in 1932, Teresa is a Doctor cum laude in Fine Arts and has been a full professor of painting and drawing at the Fine Arts Faculty of the University of Barcelona for thirty-three years. A disciple of Ramón Sanvisens (in turn a disciple of Joaquim Mir) since 1969, when she exhibited for the first time in Italy, she has always been active as an artist, internationally exhibiting an oeuvre that she herself suggests defining as a kind of expressionism of drawing and color. Energetic and deeply vital, its theme -as extensive as her perspectives- contemplates a modern figurative language at a distance, and is profoundly reflective and emotive. We have met to talk in her cosy house, next to Park Güell in the Catalan capital. It is a charming place where each piece of furniture, each object, seems to carefully guard its own history. Warmandwelcoming, she collects several copies of books that she gives me and I am proud to accept. They are magnificent and they all present her work and its author with devotion, respect and a great deal of skill. And it is not surprising, because, regardless of the quality and honesty of her work, which throughout her evolution has always been a worthy ambassador of the concerns and intentions of its author, Teresa Llàcer is a woman with a background of greatness. This is something quite exceptional in a world like today's, where almost nobody is what they seem and skill lies in extracting some truth from the complex tangles of falsehood.