Juli Ramis

Flautistes

Date: 1936

Technique: Oil on wood

Dimensions: 60 x 80 cm

Es Baluard Museu d'Art Contemporani de Palma, Serra Collection donation

Reg. no.: 124

Not on display

A work close to the Fauvism movement and its most representative artist, Matisse, and in particular his work Music (1910), not for the intensity of its colours, or the brushstrokes, which are delicate here, or indeed for the volumes of the bodies, but rather for the subject matter, for the alteration of the perspective and above all for how the artist uses colour to achieve a simple composition. Articulated by three figures arranged in a circle over a dichromatic surface with flat, uniform marks, which serve as a generator of perspective, the floor in a reddish terracotta colour holds three characters captured in a moment of musical delight. Characters with thick outlines lending them volume, with the rug as the element evidently chosen to create the tension between the three-dimensionality and the two-dimensionality characteristic of the movement of the Fauves. The blue sky does not denote depth, and only the presence in the scene of some yellow flowers, painted with more vigorous brushstrokes and arranged as a decorative element, suggests that it is taking place in the countryside.

Although Flautistes is from the mid-1930s, it still contains some transgressive overtones, and remains valid if we frame it in the context Ramis was living in when he painted it, far from Paris, not only in distance but above all in terms of the attitude with which artists “confronted” painting.

C.J.

Artist biography