There is a long tradition of painting the sea from the shore, at a safe distance. Alex Amengual works closer in. In the four paintings gathered here, selected from a larger series, the sea is both subject and material: acrylic diluted in seawater drawn from the port is thrown and washed across the paper the way the sea breaks against the rocks of the cala. Then the net does its work. Working nets from the port’s fishermen drag and press the paint, and a photographed net, transposed onto a silkscreen, is printed over each finished sea. The same tool passes three times through these paintings — the fisherman’s instrument, the painter’s, and at last the image itself — for the net is where man and sea meet. Each work is a single cast, a single catch: no two alike.
Behind these seas lies a longer thought. In Corpus Terra (2025), Amengual ground the earth of Sa Pobla, his home town, into a pigment bound with a drop of his own blood, and printed from it the imprint of his own body — a meditation on the soil that both feeds us and receives our dead. Here the thought turns toward the water: people of the sea draw their food from the same water into which they surrender their dead. Sustenance and loss share one element, and it is with that element, literally and materially, that these works are painted. Land beneath, sea around — island life, seen from an islander’s point of view.