Artist: Eulàlia Grau

In the early 1970s, Eulàlia is very young and very angry. She’s in her twenties when she begins to sketch portraits of her society - conservative, violent, authoritarian and Catholic.
She calls herself Eulàlia already ; no patronym, and no clear-cut idea of what she hopes to do, except to leave. Leaving is urgent.

In 1971, Eulàlia elects Paris and leaves her native Catalonia where Franco continues to spread his terror. Entrance tickets to national museums, chocolate wrappers and a few café receipts bear witness to this getaway. These sparse scraps of paper are laid out on a gray cardboard sheet, clearly dated. The memory of a first collage. (...)

Paris only lasted a month, but collage remained. Collage is good. Eulàlia does not want to dwell on the artistic gesture, she has no time for that, everything is urgent in the early ‘70s. (...)

In 1972 she launched the ‘Etnografias’ series of photomontages; the title speaks for itself.

Each Etnografia is made from a collage - photographed, enlarged and then reproduced on canvas using a photographic emulsion process, sometimes enhanced with a few touches of acrylic.(...)

Each painting has its collage - its miniature, fragile version, made of small pieces carefully cut out and intertwined by the artist. Eulàlia’s gesture is precisely there. As Max Ernst said « it is not the glue that makes the collage ». The resulting photomontage necessarily has a Pop aesthetic - smooth, neatly shaded by an exaggerated enlargement of the original image lending it an assumed and immediately recognizable aspect; nonetheless, Eulàlia feels closer to the visual games of the Dadaists.

Through collage, she confronts fragments of reality that do not normally meet. She details them, rubs them together on the same plane; and that’s when the work starts to scream.(...)

Eulàlia’s collages reflect the urgency she felt in those years; her works scream in all directions: towards injustice, religion, oppression, capitalism, poverty, among many others. (...)

These discriminations were topical then; but the claim was not considered feminist at the time, specifies Eulalià; it was a spontaneous response. Like a truth too often stifled.

It is obvious that Eulàlia’s collages still scream today; the urgency is still the same. Just as vivid and universal.

Don’t forget to let the little papers scream — it’s important.

Agate Bortolussi

Extract from the exhibition catalog to be published by Les presses du réel