Galería Tomás March opens the 2008-2009 season on September 25th with an exhibition of the latest work by the painter Xisco Mensua (Barcelona, 1960).

Borrowing the title of the show—O chansons foregoing—from the opening verse of Epilogue, the poem Ezra Pound composed immediately prior to his Cantos, Mensua uses references to plastic and literary works from the past coupled with an imaginary culled from the media; press photos, advertising, illustrations and snapshots from family albums, and throws them in the mix with works from our culture to try and come up with some sort of possible updating, albeit always keenly aware that the present keeps on slipping through our fingers.

The exhibition could be viewed as a chronicle of shared memory, identity and representation explored through themes like childhood, sex, art, finitude. Always to the fore are allusions to the studio, whether that might be iconographically with students, readers, etc., or the painter’s relationship with the paintings. It is as if these were the raw material of an investigation peppered with irony, subtle provocation and formal juxtapositions that produces unsettling results. Making explicit use of the quotation by including texts in his watercolours and oil paintings, the artist proposes a translation and rereading of the passage of the document to the drawing and painting, dragging us headlong into a world at once poetic and critical.

The starting point of the works now on view can be traced back to the series of works grouped together under the title “El precio de su saber” [The price of your knowing] (2003-2004) and also to the work “Informe para una Academia” [Report for an Academy] (2008) which was chosen by the curators Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg for the recent Manifesta 7, currently on show at Palazzo delle Poste in Trento. In fact, Mensua is one of the three Spanish artists included in this European contemporary art biennial.

After studying at the Eina School in his native Barcelona in the 1980s, Xisco Mensua went on to have his first one-person gallery show in 1990 at Galería Temple in Valencia. Since then he has had many solo and group exhibitions in Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Malaga, Santander, Jerez, Palma de Mallorca and León. In 1996, he exhibited his work in Copenhagen for the first time. His paintings are to be found in major museums and collections like Fundación la Caixa, Barcelona, Artium in Álava, MNCARS in Madrid, IVAM in Valencia, Fundación Coca Cola in Madrid, Fine Arts Museum in Oviedo, Fundación Chirivella Soriano in Valencia, Fundación Paço d’ Arcos in Lisbon (Portugal), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC).