We can define Claude Mediavilla’s approach to painting by the concern to unite abstract art with the fertile contribution that contemporary calligraphy brings. This ‘calligraphic abstraction’ is both contemporary yet barely developed, and surely deserving of such creative effort.

Claude Mediavilla’s works place the gesture, the movement, the vivacity of touch and the line in the forefront. These qualities of strength and inspiration can also be found everywhere where the drawing hand is most important: in the animals in the Lascaux caves, in Rembrandt’s engravings, in Picasso’s drawing. This is then the importance of this painting that privileges the impulsion in the use of line. This calligraphic line is to painting as symbolic thought is to representation. Painting organises the visible and, sometimes, the organisation becomes autonomous, detaches itself from the real, and becomes abstract.

Through constant practise, the exactitude of the line provides the rigour that prevents the gesture from becoming empty, from becoming facile, or approximate. The sacred trance, the dazzling illumination, impregnated by the rigourous control of training, gives birth to the work of Art. Then there is the force, the interior strength, the tension in the lines, the balance of mass in their asymmetry. We are present at the heart of the mystery that surrounds all creation and easily understand how abstract art, the most inexpressible of art forms, comes naturally to meet calligraphy.

Technically, Claude Mediavilla stresses the texture of his materials, building up layers and wide brush strokes on different substances: jute sacking, crumpled paper, wood, sand, where light bursts forth and explodes the emotional charge. His flowing and delicate movements sometimes become violent, torn, nearly chaotic.

I have had the good fortune to receive lessons from Claude Mediavilla, many decades ago. They impressed me then, and even today, I am still indebted to him. They enabled me to better appreciate Fine Art, and to better understand his thoughts, and the genius that brings to life these magnificent creations: zen meditation rendered as visible paint.