¡Welcome to Art Sale!

We are excited that you are here to discover our unique works of art that reflect the spirit of the landscape.

Art Sale offers a wide variety of original works of art, from oil paintings, watercolors, abstracts and drawings.

Each work has been handmade by the painter Josep Marfá, a talented artist who captures the beauty of nature and every detail.

In addition, our works of art have left their mark on the world of painting.

We are sure that you will find something that inspires you and that reflects your tastes.

We also offer a variety of services to help you find the perfect art for your home or business.

Our team of experts is happy to advise you to choose the right artwork and make your shopping experience memorable.

You will discover the beauty of nature at ventadearte.com

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BIOGRAPHY

MARFÁ, PERMANENT OBSERVER OF THE LANDSCAPE REALITY

Marfa was born in Barcelona in 1928.

She is trained under the mastery of Olagari Junyent, who enhanced his artistic qualities.

She studies at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts and Crafts, Baixas Academy and other academies and schools in Barcelona.

At first he works in graphic and advertising creation, where he demonstrates his qualities as a great draftsman.

He has always combined his facility for drawing and graphic creation with painting.

He works at Gráficas Ferrer Gregori, since 1946; Spanish Graphics, at the beginning of 1952; Difiarte, the period 1972-78: he founded the company Marfà-Ibern in 1952, specializing in graphics and advertising, which was dissolved in 1976 and, finally, he created the Marfà firm that lasted from 1976 to 1989.

Marfà is a painter concerned with colour, which he integrates into the composition through precise, agile and dynamic brushstrokes, structuring the work by zones, without seeking academic balance.

In this sense, his painting, over time, becomes less and less detailed and descriptive, giving importance to the pictorial gesture, which denotes a great dynamic facility of stroke.

Marfa does not usually patiently elaborate the work, because he is a restless and nervous painter, who paints according to the mood of the moment and, furthermore, he does not like to touch it up after having apparently finished it.

In this way, many of his paintings appear unfinished, as if the color needed yet another brushstroke.

This creative attitude endows the work with a fleeting feeling and captures moments that consolidate his personal vision of a restless and dynamic man.

In addition, Marfà paints in a very varied color palette, but within the same period, in the same series, so it is very difficult for her to present a uniform work.

In this sense, each work begins and ends, but, at the same time, there is a relationship between all the works of each period.

JOSEP MARFÁ, THE LITURGY OF PAINTING

Marfa is a surprise.

The liturgy of painting suddenly and fortunately has those pleasant outbursts that raise something unexpected in the ceremony as a whole.

And that is how Marfá makes her entrance. A wise appearance in office, loaded with discipline, knowledge, but, above all, sensitivity.

Francisco Candel had this opinion of Marfá when he decided to combine graphics and advertising creation with painting.

The Catalan writer writes that the liturgy of painting offers us surprises like that of Marfá, being logical in part because he, from the beginning, shows a creation with its own personality, influenced by impressionism in the treatment of color, which little by little it becomes more agile and dynamic, looking for the expression of the stain, relegating the description of reality in its series of landscapes to the anecdote.

There even comes a time when the Catalan artist considers the need for abstraction.

And, for a short period, he experiments in different matters, conceptualizing matter by matter, considering it as an expression of the first evident creative act.

Later, through material experimentation, he seeks the expressiveness of color.

After a while he finally leaves the abstract stage and continues his figurative experimentation again.

But, Marfá is always very clear about what he does because he is an artist who does not get carried away by the creative constraints imposed by the market, but rather his instinct encourages him to paint within a certain conception or another.

Hence, in his last exhibition in Barcelona, it was decided to present different versions of Les Rambles de la Ciutat Comtal and urban scenes from ancient Venice.

Innovating in the treatment of colour, he returns to chromatic material experimentation in some oil paintings and watercolors from Venice, while the works of Les Rambles are more gestural and dynamic.

NATURE IN THE WORK OF MARFÁ

The capture of nature in Marfá’s pictorial work is a constant, which is directly related to her eagerness to investigate formal structures and chromaticism.

In this sense, he considers nature as a thematic motif, in which the daily activity of man takes place. Even in the urban landscape works of him it is still important, as it tries to highlight his presence by all means.

This attitude is a way of claiming a more natural dynamic of life, in harmony with the environment, establishing a totally ecological discourse advanced by mimesis.

In her landscapes of Cadaqués or Llança, Marfá highlights the chromatic combination that is produced by mixing the stone and cement structure of the houses with the vegetation of the surrounding mountains and with the network of greens and blues of the sea.

The houses are turned into stones, into earth, while the forests or mountains are transformed into her pictorial work in an informal way through the capture of the kinetic movement of color.

In general, the composition is dynamic, with a rapid stroke. As for the chromatic contrast, although evident, it remains austere.

Nature is also present in his oil paintings of the Ramblas in Barcelona, through the plane trees, accompanying with his secular fidelity the constant flow of people, which in the work is represented by a multitude of colored dots; while what is observed in the foreground or at a much more descriptive level is the architecture of the place and its “aesthetic” vision.

He paints Venice, not only for the excellent urban landscape of antiquity that is offered to him, but also for a mere matter of concept.

That is to say that, although it is very rare for the painter to capture the trees that the city undoubtedly has, the most attractive thing about his scenes is his way of introducing nature into a noble architectural structure, which in this case is represented by the sheet of water, communication route between the city and the sea.

We see this attitude, especially in his oil paintings; while, with respect to watercolor, the attractive power of the sheet of water continues to be important, but in most of the works it acts as an element of kinetic and chromatic contrast with the narrow streets and the variegated and asymmetrical houses that seem to touch each other. to others.

JOSEP MARFÁ, THE DYNAMIC LINE OF COLOR

One of Marfá’s constant themes is the city of Venice.

In his latest exhibition at the Obra Social de la Caixa de Catalunya, Sala d’art Sant Jordi, we have been able to contemplate, precisely, an interesting series of watercolors by the artist that shows different “attitudes” of the well-known Italian city.

Through his watercolors, the Catalan painter reviews the different pictorial options.

In the watercolors of Saint Mark’s Square and some that exhibit the sensual characteristics of the narrow Venetian streets where the water reflects with its permanent undulation the moon or the flowers on the balconies of the houses, he establishes a romantic poetics evocative of a more human environment. .

In this context, he highlights the material chromatic intensity of color, presenting an asymmetrical composition, expressing different visions from very different angles, energizing the pictorial structure.

Drawing is another of his pictorial options, especially since an essential part of his pictorial opening grants a certain importance to it, showing a very detailed work, with a predominance of anecdotes and details in the composition, especially when he describes the unique building architecture.

In this type of work, color is in the background and always depending on what is being described.

Another of his lines of research is based on presenting the combination of formal geometric structures with the dynamism of colour.

This type of work offers a consolidated vision thanks to the geometric shapes, while the color gives a more agile character to its creation.

The asymmetry of the composition is another of his approaches. That is to say, it presents angular and sectioned approaches to the views of the Italian city, traditionally captured by other painters within an academic rigor, establishing a balance based on the sheet of water, which sometimes occupies two thirds of the surface of the the work starting from the bottom and, on other occasions, it occupies more than half of the composition diagonally, installing the houses and singular buildings on the sides or on the top, at the same time that it shows them through the reflections of the water.

In general, Marfá is a painter concerned with color, which he integrates into the composition through precise and meticulous brushwork, but not excessively marked, structuring, on the other hand, the work by zones, without falling into the geometric anecdote, without seeking balance. final academic.

In this sense, his pictorial creation, over time, becomes less and less descriptive and detailed and more agile and kinetic, although he does not renounce, at any time, pure experimentation in all senses. For this reason, many of his paintings seem unfinished, as if the color still needed a final brushstroke.

This creative attitude gives the work a final sensation of transience and capture of different moments that define the vital attitude of the artist himself.

THE VENETIAN VISION OF JOSEP MARFÁ

Marfá often paints Venice in her work, mainly due to its romantic and sensitive nature.

That is to say, he does not use the immortal Italian city as a reason for aesthetic experimentation, but instead seeks the silence of the stones and the screams of the 1st centuries through his capture of daily scenes in the alleys where the passing of people and their presence but not reflected, furrowed by moving sheets of water, due to the passage of motorboats, water taxis or gondolas for lovers.

Venice also constitutes, in a certain way, a reason for personal introspection of the Catalan artist, since through the depiction of his urban landscapes, he transmits his emotional states to us.

The color range that he uses ranges from white to blue, green and red, standing out for its austerity.

That is to say that his search for the Venetian myth does not prevent him from seeing the reality of the environment, and does not turn Venice into a personal excuse to transmit all his phobias. Nor is there an eagerness to describe reality in his work, nor an excessive attention to detail.

Historic buildings, medieval and renaissance gates continually appear in different areas of the urban landscape, acting more as a counterweight to color than as a descriptive axis of the composition.

He also seeks, with the almost romantic treatment of the color of the Venetian skies, to highlight the unusual capacity to generate beauty that this city has, where the noise of traffic and factories do not exist.

Only the murmur, the chirping of the birds and the screeching of the seagulls, the purring of the engines, the discipleful step of its inhabitants in winter, establishes the link, with a type of life from another era, which can only be give in Europe in this Italian city.

Marfá seeks to capture this environment, where the automobile does not exist, and where avant-garde architecture does not show signs of its attractive and challenging presence. Everything is a memory of the past that Marfá lives with intensity.

AN IMPRESSIVE ROMANTIC RETURN TO VENICE

J. Marfá, has exhibited in the Obra Social de la Caixa de Catalunya, Sala d’art Sant Jordi, from September 17 to 30, 1991, a complete collection of his watercolors on the city of Venice, which are characterized by post treatment Impressionist color, based on enhancing different ranges of blending that structure the composition by zones, where the drawn part is just a quick sketch.

On the other hand, his oil paintings and pastels from Venice are much more detailed, although characterized by the asymmetrical treatment of the composition and by the originality of the approaches.

Marfá is not content with painting the narrow streets from the bridges as many painters do, but rather he tours the city on foot, stopping where he deems most appropriate, regardless of the situation and the visual accessibility of the area.

For this reason, Marfá tries to approach the other reality of Venice, the interior reality, elaborated by an unusual artist, who often seems to forget about the architectural characteristics of the city to focus on the dynamics of color and shapes.

In short, Venice is for the Catalan painter a formal excuse to capture his different states of mind, but always within a common theme: the landscape, in this case urban landscape, with special attention to the austerity of color.

MARFÁ, THE CHROMATIC DENSITY OF WATERCOLORS

The most interesting pictorial series presented at the Caixa de Catalunya by Marfá corresponds to the watercolors of Venice.

This collection is made up of small and medium format papers, where he presents urban scenes of ancient Venice, without capturing the modern part of the immortal Italian city, Mestre, or its industrial area.

This need to focus on the old part of Venice is due to his attitude of romantic search and also to the description of subtle and especially well-cared environments.

In this sense, Marfá adopts the attitude of an observer of reality, to later summarize all the sensations in a few strokes that he later ends up in the studio.

There is an essential search for the states of the soul through the stones, which form the Venetian architecture.

In other words, the urbanity of his watercolor works is due to the humanity that the buildings exude, as a reflection of a recent past that the painter refuses to forget, although his work does not have any symbolist intention either.

Clean, intense and dark colors predominate, without these offering an ambiguous image, quite the contrary.

It is worth noting the range of blues, reds, blacks, browns, oranges, reds and greens.

This series of Venice is divided into two different parts:

the notes, made quickly “in situ”, made in black pencil or wax and later colored, where the agility of the line and the incidence of color extinguish its descriptive force, and the series of medium-format watercolors and pastels together with various Oil paintings made from some of these initial notes, where his facility for drawing struggles to prevail over his quality as a painter.

In short, Marfá presents two approaches that are repeated throughout his artistic activity: his talent for drawing, with landscape works where the strength of detail is contemplated, and his predisposition to combine colors within approaches dynamic.

He is a born experimenter with color, since he considers it essential for pictorial research.

In this sense, Marfá, in an earlier period, even tried to reach abstract approaches through the chromatic experimentation of matter.

Marfá also demonstrates at this stage his qualities as a creative and experimental painter, to the point that some of the pieces of this current are of a higher quality than the pictorial works of his landscape stage.

He also presents pastels on paper, which tend to be more material, but at the same time more gestural, trying to capture the atmospheres of the urban landscapes of Venice, formed not only by the contrast of the sky with the sheet of water, but also by a presence of the chromaticisms of the buildings combined in the distance with the colors of the sky and the chromatic reflections of the houses and palaces in the water.

Everything is movement and color, but in reality, the city of Venice remains calm. And that is why his watercolors are also chromatically dense because the environment is too. Venice, the city of the poetic density of silence.

Marfá presented in her exhibition at Caixa de Catalunya, Sala d’Art Sant Jordi, on Manila street in Barcelona, last September, a collection of oil paintings, pastels and watercolors based on Venice and Barcelona’s Ramblas.

He stands out, especially in the watercolors and oil paintings of Venice.

His investigation of the stain of color, his expressive chromaticism and the agility and transience of the strokes, which despite their material appearance, are more dense and subtle than concentrated.

While, in the series on Las Ramblas in Barcelona he innovates, with respect to the angles from which he paints, characterized by his originality.