Our father leaned out the window.

‘When you’re tired of being up there, you’ll change your mind!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll never change my mind,’ exclaimed my brother from the branch. ‘You’ll see as soon as you come down!’ I’ll never come down again!’ And he kept his word

(Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò)

When Pere Llobera disclosed me the title of his exhibition, I thought right away that it was an album’s title. It reminded me an album of light and melodic music, something similar to Perales. Then, Estacional (Seasonal) is a collection of songs to be listened in a particular moment of the year. Let me say quite seriously that despite Perales’ joke, the title seemed to me very appropriate to the selection of works the artist had in mind. Someone who uses that title ̶ I thought ̶ is either naïve or crafty.

While Llobera was working on Estacional contents, I was engrossed in its title. I understood Estacional as a moment of discursive maturity, of abandonment of some constant themes, of radical change in his work, but without the need of complaints or demands. I saw Estacional as the story of a transit, as a bridge which joins two different places. It came to my mind a Llobera’sdrawing where two characters gather in a hanging walkway located between two mountain peaks. When facing the abyss, they both realize the foolishness of such a meeting as well as the impossibility to get together in another place. It was then when I noticed that Estacionaldidn’t look for exhibiting a moment of change or of no return, but it just confirmed ̶ almost with carelessness, without giving quite relevance ̶ which that change had already happened.

Talking to Llobera in the weeks before the opening, I insisted on the alleged album Estacional would be. I wanted to know how he imagined it; I wanted to figure out whether he felt it like a new album, a compilation of rarities or a ‘great hits’. For what he explained to me, I mentioned that it reminded me of Le Noise by Neil Young, a powerful album where the Canadian musician seems to be precisely crafty because, in turn, he looks like he is in a review and change moment. An album without band, acoustically thought, but in turn quite electric, quite free. Llobera didn’t really enjoy such comparison. In fact, ‘In Neil Young’s case, I see myself closer to his works together with Crazy Horse’ he said to me.

A few days later, I received an e-mail where the artist, excited, displayed his comparison: ‘Estacional was the White Album (1968) by The Beatles.’

‘The Beatles experienced the so-called 10,000 hours, namely a critical point of praxis of an activity from which then on you acquire mastery. I have been painting more than ten thousand hours, but at the same time I don’t give a shit about them. The double white is an extravagant disproportion. In full creative maturity, they decide to have the freedom of making a double LP to comprise all band members’ proposals, and they do it by accepting just one rule: everyone is free to release the songs which they want and all of them must take part in the others’ songs. It is a pre-divorce album, where all the peculiarities and contradictions of their musical body are dealt with. An album which closes a time and foreshadows their farewell.Yet they did it telling themselves hello. In brief: certainly, I am the double white. This exhibition is the double white. My own double white where I say goodbye to the stuff I can’t no longer bear.’

Precisely, in that goodbye while you are saying hello is where the essence of Estacional lies. A conclusive gesture with which Llobera reviews the classical elements of his work ( narration, biography, landscape…) to say a great goodbye to them. A huge podium built from more than 300 discarded works during his career, two big boxes with portraits in white and black of his parents, several recent paintings and an armour ̶ which he built for his daughter, a wonderful piece and outside the market ̶ that turn out Estacional into a choral singing more driven by passion and pleasure than by strategy. And in that urge shows perhaps the most important theme in Llobera’s work: the dislocation of what he shows us. All his work seems lightly out of time; everything seems to be predicted for a moment which had already taken place. A mismatch which, after all, goes beyond the form to insist on the symbol.

Eventually, I understood that Estacional is the mise-en-scene of a transitional state which, in the end, remains steady to a complex and taut way of understanding painting: that of a person who, once turned the marker round, knows that will never stop painting.

Note: This text is written listening Le Noise by Neil Young and not The White Album by The Beatles.

Text by David Armengol