Bernat Ylla

Bernat YLLA BACH

Biography

20th century painter born in Vic on March 22, 1916, he died in Saint-Maixent-l'École (France) on February 18, 1994.

He started his studies in his hometown at the Vic Municipal School of Drawing; his teachers were Pere Puntí and Llucià Costa. He then went on to the Barcelona School of Architecture.
A first exhibit at a Barcelona retrospective, in which he only exposed ink drawings.
In 1936, he left Spain for Brussels, where he studied painting and perspective at the Royal School of Fine Arts, under Alfred Bastien. He did two exhibitions there.
He then took classes and advice on composition at the Paris Studio de Montparnasse managed by the French master André Lothe.
Upon his return to Catalonia in 1943, Bernat Ylla started a career as an independent painter in his own country.
He made his first personal exhibition at the Comellas Hall in Vic in December 1943, and then in Barcelona in March 1944, in the rooms of the Dalmau Bookstore, with an introduction by the critic Rafael Benet.
After that, he settled in Deià, on the island of Majorca, where he worked for four years trying to find his own form of pictorial expression.
In 1951, he moved to France and from there organised international exhibitions of his works in France, Britain, Switzerland and Yugoslavia, without forgetting Vic, Barcelona, Catalonia, Majorca, Castile, the Basque Country, Extremadura, etc.
He did his last exhibition on the French Island of Ré in 1983.
He died in Saint-Maixent-l'Ecole (France) on February 18, 1994, at the age of 78.

Arnau Puig, philosopher and art critic

BERNAT YLLA, colours of warmth, colours of cold

We ought to begin by recalling what Maurice Denis used to say: before being a battlefield, a nude or a landscape, a painting is a specific number of colours spread out in a certain way. Indeed, that is what painting is: colour spread on a specific space ; that is, first and foremost, what is aimed at those who, because they feel they are artists, use colour as a means of expression, as a way to voice their personal doubts or pleasures. One can also place the colours over a chosen space, in relation to what one wants to imitate; that can be seen as painting, but under no circumstances can the result be called a work of art. In any case, colours hastily laid out over a certain space can end up looking like a battlefield, a nude or a landscape, but that is the final effect, not what really drives the creative act of the person who feels he or she is an artist.

Such an introduction is necessary in order to write about Bernat Calvó Ylla Bach (he painted under the name of Bernat Ylla), who was born in Vic in 1916 and died in France, where he spent most of his life, in 1994. He studied at the Municipal School of Fine Arts in his hometown, and then began to study Architecture at the Superior School in Barcelona. In 1938, he moved to Brussels and pursued art studies at the Royal School of Fine Arts. He then went on to Paris and graduated from the School of Modern Art which was directed by André Lhote, the renowned artist and committed champion of contemporary art. It is very important to mention him, because Rafael Benet, one of our most competent and sensitive contemporary critics, made reference to him in commenting on the work of Bernat Ylla.

Rafael Benet was well aware of the problems surrounding contemporary art, and as an art professional and critic, he knew how much creative artists had been troubled by the appearance of Cubism, as was evident a piece he wrote in 1969 about the work of Bernat Ylla, on the occasion of an exhibition at the Vic Casa de Cultura. The critic emphasised that what André Lhote had taught, was how to arrange a painting according to a “cohesive and assertive rhythm”, where colour is neither subjected to form nor has the spatial freedom once claimed by the Fauvists. There always remained a reference in the field of visual creation, but reality was not necessary to give body to the structure, in the way it was for the masters of Cubism: it was used only to justify the chromatic explosion called for by the Fauvists. There was a need to escape the rigid Cubist rhythms while retaining the harmony of free colours suggested by the Fauvists. This large framework, the cohesive rhythm as defined by Benet, is what characterises the best works of Bernat Ylla: colour and structure.

It is something similar that Robert Yan, President of the Paris Society of Independent Artists appreciated in the work of Bernat Ylla. He too saw in Ylla’s work an innate sense of the framework, an instinct for the composition of what should be “a frantic chromatic tale”. Both critics might have wanted to refer to his initial training in architecture, although we don’t know if Ylla, who was to become a remarkable painter, ever put his studies to practical use. It may also be significant that Ylla, faced with several options, chose to attend the classes of Lhote. His art presents a structure, a chromatic arrangement combined with a total independence of colour as regards the chromatic tone assigned to every object. The colours in Ylla’s paintings are not the colours that things are supposed to be: they are explosive colours, colours that indicate accidents and variations in the visual field, but which obviously do not match what appears to be their source and justification. Ylla clearly painted because he enjoyed painting, because he enjoyed laying colour out over a space and doing it while obeying an irresistible impulse.

In no way was Ylla a professional painter dedicated to reproducing what was in front of him by mere imitation; what was in front of him only interested him because of the reaction it triggered, that drive to arrange colours within a specific space, the frame, that would become a reflection of his very soul. That is what is to be a painter. According to Robert Yan, it was Ylla’s very sensitivity that allowed this layout to become a setting of tones that are never excessively rich and always maintain sufficient nuances so that each colour, within its own fierce identity, never clashes with the one beside it. Once again, as Benet put it, the paintings of Bernat Ylla are explosions of colour organised by an ever-harmonious rhythm.

That which is true of the paintings may not be as obvious or intense when applied to the drawings, precisely because colour is absent: drawings lack the spontaneous joy given by the free arrangement of colours. True, drawings are also soft, descriptive and address our sensitivity in a straightforward manner ; but broadly speaking, a drawing, if it is not a jumble of lines subjected to mere impulse, is arguably more dependent on the form of the object it is describing, and so drawing, because of the meaning we invest in it rather than the intention of the one who draws it, alludes to something concrete. The same thing is true of Bernat Ylla’s drawings: the anecdote, the referent asserts itself; but the artist has the ability to make the lines vibrate, to place them one beside the other, echoing the model, but also echoing the joy that drives his hand as it traces the line, and the feeling that is always hidden in the background. Because, as mentioned before, to be an artist is, first of all, to be moved by the forms and the colours of our surroundings, and second, to take pleasure in capturing the image of what things are. But that is no longer art; it is seizing a fact, a circumstance or a project with a view to strategic treatment of the drawing, and has nothing to do with the emotional impulse that has driven the hand to trace the lines. Ylla understood that drawing is yet another way of giving colour and feeling to harsh reality, just as he did in his watercolours, always bright, dense, suggestive of surprising sensations.

The expressive and representative genres explored by Bernat Ylla were those of town and country landscapes, seascapes, portraits and also interiors. His creative fields were found in many places ; indeed, the motif or anecdote which compelled him to start a painting were just fuel to his creative drive. He painted in Belgium, in Switzerland and, of course, on the Parisian streets, but also in the Basque Country, in the two Castiles, in Galicia, on the island of Majorca; and there especially, in the beautiful villages of Deià and Sóller, where the concept of forms as explosions of colour meets settings that match the invidual’s own vision, because there, reality is whatever one wants it to be.

He was also enchanted by Catalonia: its sea and its coasts, its interior and plains, especially that of Vic, which he painted with an amorous vengeance, and its mountains, which he rendered in all their grandeur and density; he captured many of its groves, all with their own beauty, as well as the hillsides studded with buildings, achieving an impressive structural effect akin to Cubism.

Such are Bernat Ylla’s works. As much because of the theory he learned as because of the joy and contentment that blessed his life there, it was in France that he found what he was looking for. It is no wonder that his kindred artistic spirits, the Fauvists, developed a genuine science of sensitivity and taste in that country.

He used all sorts of processes to create explosions of formal and chromatic pleasure. The task now, is to gather his work anew, to put it on show and to display his talents as a painter of modernity. His creations are not stories of one place or another, but compositions of colour or line that perfectly respond to a sensitivity which not only perceives the purpose of the things that surround us, but also the emotional impact that they can have.

Our environment has become a setting that brings us pleasant emotions; works of art, among which those of Bernat Ylla stand out, are the most direct way to attract our attention and to convey that there is more to reality than mere usefulness or profitability. Art offers social and cultural benefits which enrich the world and open up new dimensions to our senses. This is particularly true of the visual artworks of Bernat Ylla.

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