A fascinating character, considered one of the many children of the convulsions of the 20th century, Pic Adrian (Moinesti, Romania, 1910 – Barcelona, 2008) was an art theorist, poet and painter, who consistently and thoughtfully practiced pure abstraction, the apparent simplicity of which serves as a means to access the mysterious complexity of the world.

Pic Adrian left Romania during the difficult years following the war. His family had settled in Bucharest in 1915, a country from which they had to flee due to anti-Semitic persecution, fascism and communism later on. Pic Adrian worked as a lawyer and participated in Romanian cultural life. He had published two poetry collections, the first at the age of 17. In Tel Aviv, he met his future wife, Alice Rubinstein, who shared the same brilliant artistic intelligence as her sister, the architect Marguerite Brender Rubinstein. The couple lived for a while in Paris, but while awaiting paperwork for a potential emigration to Canada, following the advice of the great cellist Pau Casals, whom Pic Adrian had met during his analytical studies on music, they moved to Catalonia, to Barcelona, where they settled permanently. He later developed abstract painting, a poetic literary work in French, as well as essays and writings on art theory, in which he outlines his thoughts situating his pictorial activity within what he calls Essentialism and Main Art, concepts in which he frames his work.

Like the ancient Pythagorean philosophers, who saw the Cosmos as a musical organisation defining the universe and making it intrinsically beautiful and harmonious, Adrian starts from the principle of a coherent and necessary solidarity between order, the universe, and music. He published several texts on the subject, including the fascinating L’Univers sonore (Paris, ed. Richard Masse, 1955). He also collaborated with musicians such as the Catalan Josep Mestres Quadreny, who composed Variacions essencials, a work inspired by his painting. Pic Adrian shows a very direct connection to the first masters of abstraction. It is from Kandinsky that he draws his hypnotic, expressive and musical vocation. From Piet Mondrian, he follows the essential value of the white and perpendicular arrangement, also perceptible in Adrian, but without an explicit linear framework.

The critic and creator of Nouveau Réalisme, Pierre Restany, appreciated this painting and wrote about him on two occasions. Restany (the painting he was gifted by Adrian is shown in this exhibition) was able to discover the mental and spiritual dimension of this work, which in some way connects with Yves Klein’s search:

“Adrian is an optimist who sensually integrates into the cosmic extension, an optimist for whom the interiority of the self is extradimensional. The essential signs of Adrian recognise no limit. And this is the secret of his liberation. His material support matters little. Rarely has a painting expressed so little ‘pictorial content’”.

(…)

“Never has a theorist been so visually logical with himself: we had to rid ourselves of four centuries of dogmatic aesthetics and the related complexes to see beyond painting the Void of all possibilities, to feel the immaterial presence of cosmic energy. It is in the light of Yves Klein and his new humanism that Adrian’s essential apicturality gains its full meaning.”

(Pierre Restany, 1969)

A contemporary of the abstract and minimalist artists, yet different and singular, Pic Adrian leads us with this “essential apicturality” towards a contemplative experience in which, like in music, the structure and meaning are not fixed but tend towards a fluid and coherent lightness, which lifts us above all banality. Without dogmatism or any narcissistic gesturing, with serenity and delicacy, he proposes geometries in the form of friendly enigmas that invite us to think in silence.