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 ainting in North Catalonia benefited from the big name French artists and their travels through the south of France at the beginning of the 20th Century which changed the history of art throughout the world. In 1905 the light, the scenes of life and the architecture of Collioure conquered Henri Matisse and André Derain. Then in 1910 the town of Ceret attracted Manolo Hugué, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They spread throughout the world an image of ‘land flattened by the sun.’ Following or revitalising the Fauvist and Cubist trends, these artists created a movement that is still strong today.
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Hugues París, "Spring"
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The overexposure of painters who visited the area tends to obscure the creations of North Catalan artists, such as the emblematic work of Etienne Terrus, sometimes Fauvre or with abstract tendencies. Historically the painting of the region attained a European quality in the 14th Century from the hand of Pere Baró, to whom is attributed the lithurgic coat-of-arms in the Cathedral at Elne. His contemporaries Jaume Serra and Ramon Destorrents, Gothic painters, were equally famous. In the 18th Century Hyacinthe Rigaud (Jacint Rigau i Ros) signed the official portraits of King Louis XIV and of the French writers Racine, La Fontaine and Boileau, whereas Anton Guerra – another North Catalan artist chose Madrid where is painted the King of Spain, Philippe V. Subsequently, history did not favour this outcrop until the 20th Century. This was the era of the emergence of the anti-modernist Camille Descossy, of the illustrator Balbino Giner, the landscape artist Henri Escarra and the artist of the immediate Martin Vivés, arriving to intrigue the art world. The contemporary painting, open to the Parisian north and the Barcelona south, is represented by the decorative tendencies of Franck Maurence and of Pritchards, the installations by Roger Cosme Esteve, the gestures and off-canvas forms of Serge Fauchier. And the ethnologic inspiration, marked by mythology, the works of Hugues Paris, presented since 1987, marrying the local value with the universal, the figurative with the introspective in a walk through memory.
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