yinjispace

ARTIST
Guillem Nadal
Gallery
KALPA
PHOTOGRAPHY
NEVER | Long Zhao
WORDS
Hao Yue
EDITOR
Gina
Collection

Mallorca in June does not meet you with spectacle, but with a kind of quiet insistence. Light clings to stone, the air carries salt, and the horizon folds into itself like a long-held breath. In the midst of this island, we entered Guillem’s home and studio. It feels like a cavern of light, hollowed and refined through decades of living. There are no ceiling lamps, no staged décor—only furniture shaped by hand, walls that absorb and return the sun, corners where the simplest gestures carry intention. Here, living and creating are inseparable. The space is alive, and it breathes with the work.

Guillem Nadal (born 1957) is regarded as one of Spain’s most significant contemporary artists, living and working on the island of Mallorca. Deeply rooted in his homeland, his practice draws on nature’s vitality while reflecting the island’s contradictory character and shifting landscapes. Moving fluidly between sculpture, site-specific installations, and painting, he has developed a distinctive abstract language: works that evoke caves, islands, or waves, while holding a tension between calligraphic gesture and tactile surface. Light and shadow, fullness and emptiness, impulse and silence—all converge within his art. His works are held in major museums and collections worldwide, yet their foundation remains inseparable from the soil and nature of Mallorca.

Guillem speaks of his art as landscapes. Yet they are not the landscapes of Mallorca’s hills or sea. They are landscapes of another order: visual and tactile, yes, but also memorial, emotional, imaginary. Relief lines rise like ridges in a topographic map; pigments settle as if pressed by geological time. To grasp them, one must look not only outward but inward. Each painting is less an image to be decoded than a terrain to be inhabited, a mirror that reflects the viewer’s own inner landscape. A thousand eyes will see a thousand different horizons.

His process begins not with design but with the rawness of nature itself. He loves what is given directly—branches, stones, pigments in their first state. Often he paints on the ground, drawing energy from the earth beneath him. The gesture recalls calligraphy, where form is born at the instant the brush touches the surface. He does not intend to make something happen; he lets the moment decide. What remains in that instant, he believes, is the most truthful trace.

Creation, for him, springs from doubt. When questions rise in him—questions of life, of meaning—that is when he works most intensely. Doubt ignites the impulse to shape, to search for form. Yet when a work is finished, the question does not vanish. Often he leaves the piece aside, unfinished in spirit, waiting until he can return to it and confront it again. Sometimes he reconciles with it; other times he cannot, and then he burns it. What survives is what endures, what holds its own against time.

In speaking of his works, he often returns to the image of the circle. Each piece is like a page in a book—free in itself, yet always moving toward an eventual whole. The circle, for him, is the life-line, the dream of a complete island. It is the lost island we all long for, the place of return that remains just out of reach. His paintings are fragments of this island, maps that rise like unfinished ridges, gestures that point toward a roundness never fully closed.

To stand in his studio is to feel this search. Around you are works completed and abandoned, landscapes rising from canvas and earth, questions suspended in silence. The space itself seems caught in the same movement: pared down, never finished, always adjusting toward greater simplicity. And in this, Guillem’s island expands beyond Mallorca. It becomes a territory of its own, a landscape of doubt and desire, of endurance and incompleteness—an island we all recognize, somewhere within ourselves.

MORE PHOTOS