JOAN POL’S SOLO EXHIBITION AT ANOMALIE GALLERY
Inuguration - 21 November : 7.30 PM
21 November – 5 December 2026
ANOMALIE Studio Gallery, Palma
Curatorial Statement
There are landscapes we recognise, and others that seem to belong to a place within ourselves for which no map has ever been drawn.The paintings of Joan Pol inhabit this territory between the visible and the intangible, where what we recognise begins to escape us.He speaks of sedimentation. The word seems to describe not only how these paintings are made, but how they hold time. Their surfaces resemble geological cross-sections: pigments, fibres, water and matter laid down, disturbed, concealed, sometimes brought back into view. Each new layer changes the meaning of the one beneath it. To look is almost to turn the pages of an existence in reverse, searching for the moments that have endured beneath the visible. What remains is never the whole story.Perhaps this is why these surfaces feel so strangely familiar. Lives, too, are altered by what they accumulate and by what they carry. An encounter, an absence, a forgotten moment can continue to shape what follows long after its outline has disappeared.And yet, no single gesture seems to have the final word. He allows the material to behave, to resist, to take unexpected directions. He intervenes, withdraws, erases, reconstructs. Painting becomes a negotiation between intention and accident, between what the artist sets out to create and what the work gradually reveals to him.Music seems to inhabit these paintings without ever making a sound. It is there in the intervals, in the tension between one movement and the next, in the delicate balance of what is expressed and what is withheld. The places Pol has encountered along his journeys — the Mediterranean, North Africa, the East — have found their way into his painting in much the same manner. Not as landscapes to be reproduced, but as something absorbed, carried across distances, gradually transformed by memory until its origins are no longer quite distinguishable.And then there is silence.The title The Geography of Silence, chosen by the artist himself, seems to me particularly revealing. Geography ordinarily describes the contours of the world around us. Here, it becomes a way of approaching what lies within. Silence, in turn, is neither emptiness nor withdrawal. It is a condition of attention, the rare freedom to stand before something without asking it to explain itself.Nothing in these works is untouched by movement, and yet something within them remains still. Perhaps silence is not what remains when the gestures end, but what those gestures, over time, have made possible. As though the painting, having passed through so many transformations, had finally arrived at a place where nothing more needs to be said.These paintings do not ask us to identify a place. They invite us to inhabit one.Nathalie Vin
Curator · ANOMALIE Studio Gallery