Ramon Pichot

Ramon Pichot's family environment favored his dedication to the artistic world. Although only he devoted himself to the plastic arts, the rest of the family was linked to the musical and poetic world; his brothers Luis and Ricardo were violin and cello performers; his older sister, Maria, was a famous opera singer married to the musician Joan Gay; and his other brother-in-law was the poet Eduard Marquina. With Nonell, Gual, J. Vallmitjana and Mir, he knew how to translate the first yellowish lights of the "Colla del Safrà" into his oils, at the same time that he began to relate to the modernist group of the previous decade. Pichot established the first contacts with this nucleus in 1898 when he participated in the purchase of the work by Regoyos In the month of Maria and, in November of the same year, he was the youngest bearer of the Greco de Rusiñol at the third modernist festival in Sitges. Meifrén was also one of the patrons and both artists, together with Matilla, would make Cadaqués a center of Catalan landscape painting. Pichot joined those places in the summer of 1898, during which, with a tent, he toured the wild desert coves of Cap de Creus. Pichot collected the atmosphere of Andalusia and captured it in his visions of La España Vieja, a work parallel to Regoyos' España negra, which he presented first in Madrid and later in Els Quatre Gats. He was a regular exhibitor at the Paris Salons from 1895 (Independents, Autogen, Beaux-Arts and one year, in 1904, at the Orientalistas) with themes consistent with his roots: Cadaqués and beach themes, Granada and its festive and obscurantist spirit. Pichot's eagerness led him to exhibit at the "Libre Esthétique" in Brussels (1902) with Anglada Camarasa and Planells, a year before Nonell and Rusiñol did. Coinciding with the turn of the century, he began to dissociate himself from the "old" modernist generation to get closer to the new avant-garde represented by Picasso. In 1900 Picasso took a picture with Utrillo, Casas, Casagemas, Germaine and Pichot at the exit of the Universal Exposition. At the end of 1902, Picasso and Pichot exhibited, along with Launay and Girieud, at the Berthe de Weill Gallery, which, together with Vollard, was one of the most innovative in Paris at the time. The two painters decorate the “Le Zut” tavern and when the artist from Malaga left Paris at the beginning of 1903, he deposited his “blue” oil paintings in the hands of Pichot. This relationship was maintained over time. For Pichot, the world catastrophe served as the theme for the drawings presented at the Dalmau Galleries in 1915. Pichot is a clear exponent of the postmodernist generation that adapts the aesthetic trend proposed by Gauguin: a break with established academic norms and a journey towards primitivism and ingenuity in the research process towards the essence of art. Pichot always evolves within a realism, except for a few symbolist moments, to arrive at a spontaneous and direct painting, treated with a simultaneous brushstroke. For the classifying taste of the time, he was a revolutionary painter, and it is easy to understand him and let us remember that he was a member of the so-called "Cage aux Fauves" of the Salon d'Automno in 1905. An approach to the work of Ramon Pichot requires knowledge of the environment in which his artistic personality developed, of the multiple relationships he maintained, in short, of the cultural world in which he lived. Based on this knowledge, in the absence of systematic monographic studies, we will be able to capture the relevance of an artist who was misunderstood in his time and unfairly forgotten in ours.