Àlvar Calvet

Àlvar Calvet was born in 1965 in Tremp (Lleida), and has lived in Tarragona since 1979. In 1989 he graduated in Fine Arts at Barcelona University, where many years later he was to give doctorate classes in “Movements in the Language of Painting”.

He is a Senior Technician in Graphic Design. Since 1993 he has been combining teaching with artistic activities. His restless nature has also led him to a deep involvement in cultural activism and curatorship, and to direct and jointly direct places devoted to art, such as the Sala Fortuny del Centro de Lectura de Reus (1996-97), the Sala el Accés del Centre Cívic Mas Abelló de Reus (1997-99), and La Trastera (an area for contemporary art in the marina of Segur de Calafell) (from 2016), among others.

He has also been a collaborator and panellist for various programmes about art and culture on Radio Vendrell, in the “Salmaldon Art” programme for Ràdio i Televisió de Vilafranca del Penedès, and in the “Espais de Saó Fonda” programme of the Canal Terres de l’Ebre, among others.

In recent years, Calvet, who has always described himself as a painter, has produced much of his work in very diverse surroundings, because he constantly avoids being labelled or compartmentalised: painting, video, performance, installation, printing, etching, among other disciplines have all contributed to the formation of his technical credo.

During the nineteen-nineties, in what he later called his “interactive period”, he directed his creative efforts in painting mainly towards a type of abstraction that was basically geometrical, in which he sought the complicity and participation of the viewer in exhibitions with suggestive titles, such as that of 1993: Toqueu-ho si us plau (“Touch it, please”), and including various works in which the public could intervene to change the final arrangement.

In a later period, which the artist himself called the period of ‘Contextual or Social Art’, he worked in collaboration with various groups, some of which were conflictive or in danger of social exclusion: artists, expatriates, sex workers, women, prisoners, residents of detoxification centres, mental patients, blind people, etc.

A lot of his work in those years (between 1992 and 2008) has been compiled in the book Líneas Cruzadas (Crossed Lines), in which the theoretical bases are presented, together with the work processes, photographic reports on the works and the contributions of art critics such as Pilar Parcerisas, Assumpta Rosés, Glòria Bosch, Pilar Bonet, Luis Francisco Pérez, José Carlos Suárez, among others.

Thematically, we could include a lot of his pictorial work from that period within what we call portraiture, but with the caveat that in this case the portraits are abstract, that here, the codes are different, being basically symbolic.

At the moment, Àlvar Calvet is experimenting with lack of eyesight and blindness, a subject on which he embarked as a result of a commission from a Madrid gallery in 2012 which is documented in the catalogue ‘NIX, d’artistes com a cecs, de cecs com a artistes’ of the Tarragona Provincial Council’s Museum of Modern Art, and is combining this with various other proposals, some of them, in the words of their author himself “for the mere pleasure of painting”.

Calvet experiments with more than pictorial technique — with etchings, photographs, actions and other conceptual practices. The generic registers of his works refer to experiences of confinement or loss, such as: darkness, isolation, marginalisation, prison, frontiers, and always assume that the individual is in conflict with society.

In some of his works he shares their creation with the viewer and becomes an interceder for anonymous voices.

From 2015, social and political themes took on more and more importance in his artistic activity, and his work and performances are connected with the assertion of human rights and democratic freedom, and in raising awareness of certain ecological problems, as in one of his latest individual works in Manresa Volem lo riu viu (“We want the river to be alive”) or in his latest action Abraçar un paisatge amb els ullts tancats (“Embracing a landscape with one’s eyes closed”).

The following stand out among his numerous awards: the City of Reus Premi Adquisició of 2002; the Premio Beca Carles Mani of Tarragona Council (2008); the Premio Contratalla Especial de Grabado of Vila-seca Council (2006); the first Premio Tapiró de Pintura of Tarragona Provincial Council, of 2012; the second Premio de la Bienal de Arte Contemporáneo ‘Exportart-Importart’ of the Port of Tarragona (2013); the Lucius Annaeus Florus Premio de Creación of the Tarragonès Regional Council (2013), for his artistic and teaching career; the Premio a la Mejor Iniciativa Turística of the Badalona Fórum de Turismo (2014) for ‘Monkeys in Love’.

Àlvar Calvet’s work may be found in numerous private collections as well as in public collections such as those of the Council and of the University of Cádiz; in the Museo de Sîyasa in Cieza, Murcia; in the Museo Municipal de Ourense, Galicia; in the Museo de Valls, Tarragona; in the Ajuntament de Tarragona; in the Centro de Lectura de Reus, Tarragona; in the Museo de Arte Moderno de Tarragona; in the Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid; in the Patronato de Cultura de Mataró, Barcelona; in the Fundación Vilacasas de Barcelona; in the Museo Comarcal de Reus; in the Fundació de la Universidad Rovira y Virgili de Tarragona; in the Fondo de Arte of the Port of Tarragona; in the Davis Museum, Barcelona; in the Fundación Hispánico de Doetinchem in the Netherlands; in the Fundación Yaxs of Guatemala, etc.