Miquel Mont

The work of Miquel Mont (1963, Barcelona) reflects on the perception of the exhibition space through painting, the physical limits of the painting, and its progressive expansion into space. To consider his work as painting is to limit its possibilities, given that object, medium, and content are omnipresent terms in the artist's work, which questions the validity of continuing to paint in the 21st century. His process is based on theories that study the perception of painting, in which the dialogue between painting and its environment is of utmost importance for creation. His pieces inhabit the wall, escaping the traditional formula of the painting. Interested in a third dimensionality of painting, he experiments with the rupture of the traditional medium: first, he fractures his annotations in the overflow of the paint, on the margins of the frame, and then increasingly liberates the material through a rigorously intellectual process that has occasionally led him to also work as a curator, developing his theories with the work of other artists. This break with convention already appears tentatively in this 1997 polyptych, featuring four monochrome paintings based on multiple layers. The painting becomes a deconstructed composition into four autonomous units, which are necessary to form a whole and which interact with each other. Along with space, color is of great importance in the artist's work, as it articulates the overall meaning of the piece, never in a decorative manner. Over time, Mont has expanded his work, first as a wall painting and then into the third dimension, detaching it from the wall to occupy the space sculpturally, using wood and methacrylate as supports that complement the importance of color in the pieces. Miquel Mont has lived and worked in Paris since 1989.