PICTORIAL SUBJECTIVISM
A very first exhibition experience, arriving at the precise moment it had to arrive, at the exact stage of personal and professional maturity to allow Martí Ceballos defend his essence of artist-painter. An essence stemming from a family tradition, from genetic and environmental information, and from the implicit and explicit will to be what he, out of all these circumstances, sooner or later had to be (or had always -however intimately and almost secretly- been until now).
Martí Ceballos is one of those persons naturally gifted for design and painting, those who have always drawn and painted, more than written and spoken, for the sake of pleasure and the need of communicating his experiences, so diverse in temper, by means of stains and color, in an ever figurative formal context, typically contemporary in the making, out of which his loving for the German expressionists of the “Der Blauer Reiter” group, the “fauvists” or the singular genius of a Van Gogh can be easily traced.
Martí Ceballos is a painter for sensations rather than realities, no matter how deep inside the external reality he may set off in order to achieve them, so that every subject he brings upon us, be it landscape or figure, turns into an answer to this will of his to recreate life according to the real artist-painter-creator criteria, by doing and undoing with imagination and inventiveness, and especially with the subjective use of color, in keeping with the subtle standards that each painting determines.
Guillermo Martí Ceballos has abandoned the neo-impressionist line his father, painter Oriol Martí, followed, without dropping either his paternal heritance nor that of other famous painters. In doing so he has defined this very particular style he publicly presents to us for the very first time now in the Kreisler Galery, one that with the typical evolution of time will take us to unexplored routes which, as of today, he himself is unaware of.
Claudi Puchades
Journalist
Catalunya radio
March, 2000
...His work is definitely interesting. It is -one might say- sort of a return to the meaning of the term “nabis”, a highly personal work, full of expressive force and fierce chromatic quality, with figures deliberately distorted, eager to explain each one’s personality, their goodness and what is not all that good, their weaknesses; and as for the landscapes, they look like wild animal roars, albeit with a very peculiar force, arising from –I would say- the painter’s personality, one whose plastic trajectory I would certainly be sad to miss, for it seems to me he has a lot more to tell us.
Josep Maresma i Pedragosa
Art Critic/Member of ICOM ARXIU D’ART
Catalunya radio
April, 2000
Enlisted in German expressionism, Guillermo Martí Ceballos opens his first individual exhibition. He is a well trained painter with experiences to convey. Both graphic and poster design, activities to which he -with professional success- devotes his labour hours, have not diminished his profound sense of painting. His colour is outgoing and its intensities are not gratuitous. He builds up his canvasses very aptly, turning them into private universes... He has the quality and amplitude of vision to express a world of his own. I recommend a visit.
Josep Mª Cadena
Art Critic
EL PERIODICO DE CATALUNYA
April, 2000
From April 26th through May 13th, painter Guillermo Martí Ceballos –son of also painter Oriol Martí- has shown his work at the KREISLER gallery. Martí Ceballos studied at the Massana School and also with artists Boter and Santaló, and is member of the Circulo Artístico de Sant Lluc. His palette manages a very strong and daring chromatic range; however the outcome is as arresting as would be that of a fauvist or German expressionist. In this show he has captured landscapes of Barcelona, the human figure and still lives.
Eduardo Mirallet
Art Critic
LA BROCHA
May, 2000
In his first individual exhibition –under wise tutelage– Guillermo Martí Ceballos originally recreates –and, of course, gets himself into– the pictorial atmosphere of one who, with the vigour of the touch of his brush and the intimate relationship with the colours he employs, devotes himself to the service of the expressive intensity emanating from within his interior, aggressively capturing the simplification of shapes and of perspective, as well as the application and exaltation –and enjoyment– of such a range of almost pure colours that plunge him into the chosen world of fauvism.
His work is audacious, almost provocative –I would say– when it comes to certain shades; of exemplary bravery, of sheer elegance and exquisite sensibility, the latter particularly regarding four fragile and delicious gouaches.
Eduardo Bengoa
Art Critic
GAL ART
May, 2000
MARTÍ CEBALLOS AT THE CONSELL D’ART GALLERY
I have just been able to verify that what struck me about his work in the first show I could admire by him has not disappointed me, on the contrary, I have found an interesting evolution and a new way of working his painting as well as a new force in each one of his juicy strokes.
At that time I wrote of the nabis feeling, of his personal and absolutely expressive strength, that he aptly coupled with this strong and firm chromatics, all of what casts authentic personality onto his work; of the goodness and what is not all that good about his explained characters, of their weaknesses, that which is expression of reality and of what is authentic, captured with seriousness, serenity and sincere wishes.
It appears to me that he is still on a good way, one he necessarily has to mature, keeping just as faithful and responsible throughout his work as he has until now.
Josep Maresma i Pedragosa
Art Critic/Member of ICOM
ARXIU D’ART
February, 2003
MARTÍ CEBALLOS AND EVERYDAY COLOUR
A follower of German expressionism, Martí Ceballos feels the colour of everyday life. Poets and painters usually see the city and its ordinary citizens cast in grey, the latter overwhelmed by the vulgarity of everyday situations. Martí Ceballos, conversely, presents us with the satisfaction of couples passing by, men waiting at a bar or men and women strolling down such a habitual place as the Ramblas in Barcelona.
The oil paintings and paper and cardboard gouaches that Martí Ceballos offers to us are a summary of reality. He outlines within figuration and turns colour into the main vehicle of his well devised way of seeing and thinking. He proposes his ideas and thus he has others’ flourish.
Josep Mª Cadena
Art Critic
EL PERIODICO DE CATALUNYA
December 2003
In tune with their line for good taste and variety of styles, the Gonzalo Oliván Gallery features until April the 16th the work of painter artist Martí Ceballos who, echoing a quote by French painter Paul Gauguin, conveys in his catalogue a full declaration of intentions: “The artist must not copy Nature, but withdraw its elements and create a new element”.
Martí Ceballos, who states that his vehicle is colour, is a restless artist and a courageous one at the time of expressing himself on all sorts of subjects: nudes, landscapes, portraits and still-lives.
With a confessed heritage from German expressionism and a superb taste for shapes and structures, aided by this range of colour symphony, he achieves a personal universe where all things depicted are as real and routine like as we are. With great freedom of movements and of shape alterations, spaces go beyond those of his paintings, conferring them a particular life that the viewer can sense. We get the feeling of witnessing an artist who sees through his work a way of knowledge, of opening up internally by means of all that he explains, hence being able to go from the purest emotion –two faces in love looking at each other– to the sheerest form of tenderness –a portrait of her daughter Andrea– to a urban atmosphere, bringing together in the picture elements as opposed as our Punta and the cars parked at the Fragata.
Thanks to a perception, a great creative imagination and his self-confidence about everything he expresses, each one of his paintings allows us to get closer to a part of himself invaded by his huge colours ever present in all of his paintings and set to music by one of his, in my opinion, most outstanding canvases starring The Beatles. Hence through all the elements in his pictures he shows his great virtues of great definer, through colour, of our visual world.
And having the great everyday challenge of not willing to go from a collective thematic, not even of defining on a paper the final structure of a painting, having Art speak directly to him to then artistically speak to us in turn.