Carme Bassa

Carme was born in Barcelona in 1953. She studied at Escola Massana and at EINA, where she studied not only painting but ceramics and other techniques, from engraving to al fresco. She eventually enhanced her training at the Lorenzo de’ Medici Art Institute in Florence. Such an amount of knowledge and technical resources has resulted into extremely cared for work, with a certain Renaissance touch.

Carme Bassa’s world is both new and old at the same time. Like the beauty and character bestowed upon a face by passing years, her work has the depth and markings of a face that has lived, matured and transformed into something better and more complex. Her subtly prepared paintings are offerings that contain gestures and silhouettes of implicit images and fleeting objects, figures engraved on multiple overlapping layers, almost bas-reliefs, connecting to a prehistoric iconography that sometimes brings to mind petroglyphs of old cultures, already vanished. These graphic elements in her work are remembrances of an ancient memory, which speak to us of remote places and epochs.

She mainly uses the traditional encaustic technique, which blends beeswax with different waxes and pigments. Carme is deeply attracted by the richness of ochre and blue colors that evoke the Mediterranean lands and skies. She adds figurative elements that tell both about everyday life and about her vital and sentimental concerns, without abandoning abstraction. In spite of expressive tensions, she tries to make her paintings convey a pacifying reading in a world that bears too much stress and hardship.