This exhibition shows the different identities that coexist in Feliu Elias / Apa / Joan Sacs (Barcelona 1878-1948): a realist painter, a draftsman and acerbic cartoonist, and a historian and controversial art critic, respectively.

This recourse to otherness resulted in an extensive and diverse oeuvre: more than three thousand works including drawings, posters, books, writings and paintings. We must also remember his work as an editor of magazines, a scholar, and a defender of heritage and the techniques of different crafts — in which case he used the pseudonym “Dimoni Verd” (Green Demon).

An intellectual with progressive ideas in the field of caricature, he was a painter and combative theoretician of realism. A critical spokesman for the avant-garde, he went in search of “pure reality”, drawing on knowledge of the art of the old masters and artisans. Today, we can affirm that his pictorial work is in dialogue with the realism(s) of the interwar period in Europe.

A selection of his different creative registers (from the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, private collections and public institutions) now allows us to gauge his relevant contribution to the Catalan art scene — with its own contradictions — and his criticism of anything that departs from realism.

Attracted by the artistic and economic possibilities of the media and under the pseudonym “Apa”, he excelled as a cartoonist in advertising, posters, books, children’s publications and, above all, in satirical magazines such as Cu-Cut!, L’Esquella de la Torratxa and La Campana de Gràcia. In 1908 he founded Papitu, a Catalan weekly magazine that was very advanced aesthetically but very turbulent from an ideological point of view. His anti-German drawings of the Great War (published in Iberia and compiled in the book Kameraden) increased his fame and international projection.

His mocking and devastating caricatures captured the pulse of an era and showed his republican, leftist and anticlerical disposition. Committed to his ideals, Apa mocked both the Lliga Regionalista and the military establishment and the anarchists of the FAI, which led him to two exiles in Paris.

Far from the noise of the editorial desks of popular magazines and weeklies, the self-taught Feliu Elias painted in the silence and solitude of his studio, especially after his first exile in Paris in 1913. If he was a man of rapture when writing, he was a man of order when painting, seeking perfection and the containment of emotion. Nevertheless, as the critic Rafel Benet pointed out, his painting burned.

His work, criticised at the time for its photographic coldness and later described as hyperrealist, was slow-baked and remained practically unchanged throughout his forty years of dedication. The one exception was his style: first post-impressionist and then of virtuoso meticulousness, it was the result of studying the techniques of the old masters, especially Joannes Vermeer. He combined genres (portrait and still life) with a “sympathy” for the art of oriental objects, glass, ceramics, Toile de Jouy fabrics and Empire furniture, without forgetting the tools of the trade. He placed animate and inanimate on the same plane, reflecting a suggestive play of light and shadow on objects. He cultivated a style of painting inherited from the Dutch small-format genre and the French tradition, with concurrences with the Italian Novecento and German New Objectivity.

In 1939, when Franco’s troops entered Barcelona, Feliu Elias went into exile in France with his family, passing through several towns before returning to Barcelona in 1947 just months before his death. Discipline and order were his best weapons of combat during those years of the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and dark totalitarian regimes. Despite his increasingly precarious physical and mental health – he was interned in a concentration camp – when he was able to paint he continued to cling to an objective realism, showing no apparent signs of adversity.

These canvases decorated the house of the lawyer Francesc Masferrer, who wanted to pay homage to his family and was committed to the cultural renaissance of the city of Vic. The commission was a challenge for Elias, who was used to small formats and his proverbial slowness.

Elias combined different genres (landscape, portrait, allegory), with rich colouring and a sometimes divisive style. There are slight echoes, perhaps, of the diabolical works of Jan Brueghel or of William Blake – an artist who was then being rediscovered historiographically – or of Oriental art. It is a theatrical, fanciful ensemble, connected with elements of tradition (the fruit of his background and erudition) and contemporaneity (the debate on modern construction, such as skyscrapers) — the epitome of Feliu Elias’ art and meta-painting.