Fita ART INTEGRAT, 2005. - Fundació Fita

INTRODUCTION
We cannot underestimate the importance of
an artistic medium as common as integrated art
is. It is very true it lives different vicissitudes
from the types of art which we can call exhibition
art, but not for this does it have any less importance.
These types of expression have left large
quantities of works to communities, cities and
museums all around the world, as the most priceless
witness to the fact that today we still admire
it and live history has been stamped on places
and international culture.
This art, so linked to the social life of the communities,
is usually the work of artists and craftworkers
working as a group. This is still produced
nowadays and institutional support would be
necessary to give it full and vital continuity
which would help to show its worth, as also the
proper love and conservation as a phenomenon
of the great collective importance it has.
The affection and enthusiasm I felt for orientating
artistic learning had as a common objective
the fulfillment, in the future, of works like
those to be found in public places: streets, churches....
in spaces where were produced deliberately
works to order or integrated art, suitable
works for each place or specific atmosphere,
integration with the architecture, in the urban
space. To sum up, the objective was to make a
more social art, of public communication and
also private.
Without doubt, in the conviction of my argument
I may have been influenced also by the fact
that when little short of 9 years old, I already felt
a love for those skills which I lived near to, of
which I still remember the smells and the feel of
the tools, the plastic of each one, and also that
during the years 1939/40, when I was only 12
years old, I had a master, the first best, Mr
Carrera. He was doing some reliefs for the new
bridge Pont Major, in Sarrià of Ter – inaugurated
on the 4th of February 1940-; I lived the
whole process while observing how the sculptor,
with great virtuosity and skill, modeled, produced
the moulds and, afterwards, the process of
applying them to the artificial stone until, finally,
you saw it finished.
Another point of stimulus I found in the Belles
Arts School of Saint Jordi, in Barcelona, in the
class of Mr Marés, where monthly we had to prepare
some themes born out of the same class but
elaborated outside of the school, and we exhibi-
ted them in order to mutually critique them
among ourselves. Mr Marés moderated and
orientated the lively and always interesting class.
The themes were very varied, from a public
spring to a monument or a sculptured work for a
particular place. The experience which this master
possessed, because of the great work he had
done in specializing, helped us to understand this
vast field of art.
And following on from here, at the Belles Arts
School, we arrive at the moment when the
Flamma group was born, composed of Romà
Vallès, Joan Lleó, Francesc Carulla, Albert
Garcia and myself. The collective emerged with
the manifest intention of making integrated art,
and its philosophy postulated renouncing the ego
in favor of the work. We were interested in the
group and the works inspired by the collective,
and for this reason we signed them with the
Flamma name, even if the ultimate responsibility
always depended on one of us. Of the five artists,
it was Romà Vallès who proposed the name of the
group, decided after a vote which took place in
the library of the Museum of Modern Art (in the
Ciutadella Park of Barcelona), where today there
is the representative government of Catalonia.
The group was born in the winter of 1948 in
Valldoreix, at the home of the same Romà Vallès.
We were idealists. Architects rescinded the plastic
art in their works. They were only interested
sporadically, at the moment of doing something
additional. It can’t be said for this reason that
their existed a suitable climate for an integration
of the arts with architecture. Neither did the institutions
go out of their way to accept artists’
works, in which the imagination and their own
creative contribution to a social or cultural fact,
stood out.
The gossip and chat which found its way into
the Flamma group was considerable. We saw art
as an auxiliary to industry, commerce, as a social
means, to add culture to the surroundings.
Exhibiting and the established system seemed too
limited. Exhibiting seemed the only permitted
way, but we, on the other hand, believed that
integration would open a wider field. It was
necessary certainly to create this need. It was a
difficult job, but we were young with the will to
change the panorama of a part of art, born out of
a particular situation in a specific place and a
specific time. It was about thinking of an art
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