Pedro Gandía Translations. Was born on August 4, 1953, in Minglanilla, Cuenca, Spain, where he lived until he was nine years old. He studied secondary school in Cuenca, a city that marked him by awakening in him, with its Museum of Abstract Art, a taste for art, to which his friendship with Fernando Zóbel contributed. Also for Literature, pleasure that he discovered through his teacher, and also friend, Vicente Tusón. In 1972 he moved to Valencia and enrolled in the Superior Conservatory of Music and in the School of Arts and Crafts, disciplines that he later left for the studies of Philology. His literary education was marked by his stays in Paris and its museums between 1974 and 1976, as well as by his visits to Rome, Florence and London, where his pleasure in artistic creation was revived. He has been a painter (1982-1992), sculptor (1996-1999), professor of Literature, art dealer and director of the “Jade” collections, of narrative and poetry, of the Institute of Modernist Studies. Since 2016, he has re-taken the brushes to paint, on some of his old canvases, his series “Elegías”.

Pedro Gandía Translations. If poetry was painting for Simonides of Ceos, and poetry was a talking image, it is fascinating to study the painted images (mute verses) of the poet-painter. The case is not uncommon; all knowledge tends by synthesis towards its visualization, and there are many  splendid examples throughout history: Salvador Rosa, Goethe, García Lorca, William Blake, Moreno Villa …

Pedro Gandía Translations. Being the image, by definition, a set of forms and figures endowed with unity and signification, Pedro Gandía composes the images of his abstraction harmonizing forms and figures that could be said belonging to the color itself: each color seems to have its own body, skin and movement, as something inseparable from their pigmented reality.

The colors weigh, glide, embrace or become almost weightless waving its profile, as a sendal, to the impulse of an even lighter pigment; they interpret a slow dance, a movement always related to the musical that remembers “stagings” of settecentists’ operas (perhaps Bibiena?); studies for a parsimonious and cyclopean choreography.

The poet directs here the splendid music of Pedro Gandía’s verses.