Carles-Tolrá, Ignacio

Ignacio Carles-Tolrá left his homeland in 1958 to seek freedom of thought elsewhere. In 1960 he moved to Geneva, where he worked for the Red Cross for thirty-four years until his retirement. In the early 1960s he began to teach himself to paint, mostly at night, in order to act out his aggression. He impulsively created strange figures between humans and animals, to which he often added collage elements. Carles-Tolrá painted against injustice, against human cruelty and stupidity, against the arrogance of meddling with nature. Through his painting he opposed all these things with his unbridled imagination. He freely mixed techniques, created bizarre creatures out of blotches of paint, and portrayed modern-day human beings with control buttons instead of facial features who mutate into a cloned caricature of himself.

Ignacio Carles-Tolrá
1928 Barcelona, Spanje - 2019 Santander, Spain