Lita Cabellut

March 23, 2012 Painting

The artwork of Lita Cabellut (Barcelona, 1961) clearly reflects her origins. Spanish, catalan, gipsy. But not only. Trained at Amsterdam’s Rietveld Academy and working in Den Haag, the painter carries all the Dutch tradition. Classical credentials that appear in her portraits. The figure so emerges from dark backgrounds with reduced chromatic ranges that allow, layer after layer, to look for the wished light. Though, classicism only isn’t enough to describe Lita Cabellut’s propositions. The violence of Bacon, the matter and textures of Tapies or still the apposition of curt colors fit Cabellut in line with modernity and even contemporaneity.

Coco NR. 12 (2011)

From this synthesis comes out an own pictorial language serving her expression. Through series, focused on the group (prostitutes, vagrants,…) or the subject (Coco, Piaf, A la Mesa,…), she represents, illustrates, interprets, reads, integrates human nature, both one and various, multiple. And despite, the systematic absence of scenography, each painting, through a look, a swelling, a tensing or a position, tells the intensity of a specific reality, a particular state. A model some will interpret through the light of Lisa Cabellut’s personal story, taken until she was thirteen years old, between Las Ramblas and El Raval, between street artists, prostitutes and the dormitories of Franco’s orphanages.

Coco