Lluís Lleó

A self-taught artist born into a family of painters, Lluís Lleó has absorbed influences from Catalan Romanesque architecture, early medieval art, and Renaissance art. He often employs classical techniques (including working in fresco) to execute large-scale geometrically abstract images. VITREA demonstrates Lleó's enduring concern for drawing. One of a series of forty-five drawings, each entitled after a type of the butterfly species Morpho achilles, is a tribute to Lleó's friend and patron Marion Selig, who passed away in 2015. The bottom half of the drawing suggests the wings of a butterfly, while the linear band above it exposes the organic pulp of the paper yielding a sense of pure form and spirituality. Lleó saturates the thin, absorbent paper with ink and graphite to give the surface a shimmering quality that evokes the flight of a butterfly. The artist has works in the collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid as well as in private collections in Spain and France.