THOUGHT

Niebla wanted to be a painter at the age of 12. I mean, socially painter, because he thinks one is born painter. So, if he already was, then what he wanted is to live painting. To turn this art into his trade. Maybe due to the humble origin of his family, he saves a great predilection for the poor materials and for the austerity of black over white. Well, just the power of contrast. He has always come back to drawing, as looking for a light, like a truth to believe in.

Every period of his painting has had a parallel series of drawings which refers to every single stage he lives. From one of those moments there is a pencil-made drawing called 'Costa Brava Sea', made when he was 10 years old. Looking at his life's course, one can say that drawing has been a talisman to him. Twenty years ago he chose to live Empordà, the inner Costa Brava. He installed his home and studio in a town called Casavells.

He actually began as a painter in Tetuán, Tánger and Ceuta. In the first city there was a painter, son of italians, called Miguel Bernadini, who accepted Niebla as a workshop assistant. Bernadini used to like to talk a lot, so Niebla learnt the main knowledge about painting and painting's history that he knows nowadays.

Every painting will be a page of my diary.

While he was studding painting at school, he started to create personal-nature works. He used to do those paintings at his grandparents' home where he used to live. Expressionist works with great amount of materials and bright colors belong to that moment. He took painting as a way of expression and he considered that colors and shapes constitute a language through which one case express anything, even those things that sometimes are terribly difficult to express by words. He has extended this concept until nowadays.

Each work must be necessary, essential and definitive.

He saves lots of drawings and paintings from that period. Also those paintings considered abstract. Full of influences but, however they clearly describe the mood and the passion of the trade. At the age of fifteen he left his country and went to Sevilla to start his studies of art. He has always dedicated to painting, and everything he is and he has he owes to it. Sky manipulations. In 1972 he started working is a painting series related to the sky. He decided to call them 'Sky Manipulations'.

Something similar to express an impossible. Man's desire of own the sky and have the possibility to use it. After some time he understood that this path was driving him to a "cull de sac" (sack bottom, in catalan), with no exit. Artworks started to repeat and just at that moment the sea appeared again as a plastic element. The painting called 'Set mars i set cels' (Seven seas and seven sky's) is the first one that opens the path, again, to the possibility of expressing through the sea.

Recurring series: The sea - the sea.

One can say that the sea as a subject, which was born when Niebla was very young, has been recurrent, but was during the three years he lived in Madrid (from 1992 to 1955) when he started to used it in this particular way. He was lucky having a fantastic studio. But was in that room where he started to suffer the distance from his usual creative space, Empordà. Homesickness of that other reality that little by little he created: Casavells.

My painting turns here thicker in contents. I am making the pages of my diary. Lots of my works refer to my personal mood. I try painting being a pleasure to me.

I always paint from my memory, in a studio with no windows. I do not want nothing when I stay in it. The only thing left for us, the painters, is the control of the emotion. I believe in painting and, in any case, I believe in the person who decides to touch with the image. I've always been sensible to the social context. And one of the painters that has recovered the great tradition of murals.

"Because me, like you can imagine, I believe that painting is a language, so it is able to transmit emotions, fears, presentiments, criteria and desires, doubts and truths. And it can talk about anything, in the end, about life; but from this complex language, thick and ancient and at the same time alive and current, enriched by new words, voices that arrive from any continent, innocents or hidden, but that we can feel as a something so deep that brings us to the future. Painting as the contained emotion, always.."