Josep Vergés Grau — Seeking a Living (1978) — Oil on canvas

Life among the walls

A wall occupies almost the entire surface of the canvas. Large bluish and greenish blocks, eroded by time, are piled one upon another, turning the architecture into a heavy and almost impenetrable presence. However, in the center of the composition, a tiny orange flower emerges from a black opening.

The title written by the artist himself on the reverse, Buscant la vida (Seeking life), immediately transforms the reading of the work. The small flower ceases to be a simple detail to become the true conceptual center of the painting: a living element that finds space where it seemingly should not be.

Vergés Grau constructs the scene through a painting of marked materiality. The ashlars do not appear as uniform surfaces; each one possesses variations of blue, turquoise, ochre, gray, and pink, applied through layers and textures that evoke wear, humidity, and patina. The dark lines separating the stones reinforce their weight and turn the wall into an almost abstract structure.

Faced with this accumulation of large, cold forms, the flower is rendered on a minimal scale. Its warm orange and thin green stem are enough to immediately attract the gaze. It does not need to occupy more space: precisely its fragility in the face of the enormous wall concentrates the tension of the entire composition.

At the far right, the language of the wall changes. Fragments of construction, small rectangular shapes, and more textured areas appear, introducing a second architectural texture. The painting thus oscillates between the recognizable representation of a wall and an almost geometric organization of planes and surfaces.

Dated 1978 on the reverse, Buscant la vida belongs to a particularly interesting moment in Vergés Grau's trajectory, when his painting had already developed its own language based on walls, textures, matter, and geometric forms.

Josep Vergés Grau — Painting, matter, and poetry

Josep Vergés Grau (Sant Quirze de Besora, 1925 – Vic, 1989) was a painter and poet, essentially self-taught in his training. He began his pictorial activity relatively late and held his first solo exhibition in Vic in 1970.

During the seventies, he developed a style of painting particularly interested in matter and the details of walls, treated not as simple architectural backgrounds but as surfaces charged with memory. Over time, he incorporated geometric structures and moved toward languages increasingly close to abstraction.

In 1978, the year of this work, he exhibited at the Galeria Dama in El Vendrell. Subsequently, his career acquired an international dimension, with exhibitions in France, the United Kingdom, and Belgium. In 1984, he won the First Prize for Abstract Art at the I International Biennial of Lyon, and the following year he received the Vermeil Medal from the Société Académique Arts-Sciences-Lettres in Paris.

His artistic production closely coexisted with literature. He published and illustrated books such as Jeroglífic and, later, Llunari bilingüe and L’arc voltaic, maintaining that dialogue between image, symbol, and word that is especially pertinent when facing a work titled Buscant la vida.

1978 — The wall turned into language

The date preserved on the reverse allows for the painting to be precisely situated within his production of the seventies.

Here, the wall does not function solely as a motif. The stones become large fields of color, individualized and separated by black lines, while the irregularities, stains, and textures acquire as much importance as that which they represent.

The small flower breaks this structure in an almost silent way. Faced with a surface built to resist, something fragile, organic, and ephemeral appears.

The title completes this opposition without needing to explain it excessively: seeking life where there is barely any room left for it.

Technical sheet

Author: Josep Vergés Grau (1925–1989)
Title: Buscant la vida
Date: 1978
Technique: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 46 × 61.5 cm
Signature: Signed “Vergesgrau” in red in the lower left corner
Inscriptions: Titled and dated on the reverse: “Buscant la vida” / “78”
Numbering: Inscription “39” on the stretcher
Subject: Symbolic composition / wall and plant element
Period: 1970s production
Style: Symbolic figuration with a tendency toward material abstraction
Support: Canvas on a wooden stretcher
Presentation: Unframed
Conservation status: Good general condition, with signs compatible with its age. It correctly preserves the texture and chromatic reading of the pictorial surface. The photographs are part of the description of the conservation status.

Workshop Note — A flower is enough

There is one detail that completely changes this painting.

We could dwell on the textures of the wall, the variations of blue, or the almost abstract organization of the stones. But Vergés Grau places a tiny flower in the middle of it all.

And then the title appears: Buscant la vida.

The scale is essential. The artist does not make the flower the protagonist by increasing its size; he does the exact opposite. He surrounds it with enormous, heavy architecture so that its presence seems even more improbable.

Dated 1978, the work brings together several central elements of Vergés Grau's language —wall, matter, geometry, and symbol— in a particularly simple and direct composition.