Daniel Argimon (1929) began to paint in 1955, but only three years later he perfected, within non-figuration, a personal technique and image. In 1958 he eliminated colour and simplified composition, with the desire, according to his own statement, to “achieve a painting as grey as existence”.
CIRLOT, Juan-Eduardo: “Arte nuevo en Barcelona; Bosch, Lluciá, Argimon”. Índice de Artes y Letras, Madrid, March 1961.
Argimon is the first artist in Spain to give the aesthetic quality of collage to torn, discarded, photographs.
CIRLOT, Juan-Eduardo: “Argimon”. Catalogue Miami Museum of Modern Art, Miami, October 1964.
In Argimon’s most recent work, form and natural object are incorporated —in a decisive and deeply representative way— into the informal space of the painting, masterly elaborated. His paintings have authentic mental content and definite significance.
RODRÍGUEZ AGUILERA, Cesáreo: “Daniel Argimon”. Publicaciones Españolas, Cuadernos de Arte. Colección ordinaria Ciclo de Arte Español, Ateneo de Oviedo, 1964.
It cannot be said that Argimon is a testimonial painter or an accusatory one. Nor is he a painter of pure beauty or a painter of a willed neutrality. The integration of neo-Dadaist or Pop elements is done in a simple and uncompromising manner. […] Everything fits in this work of a true artist.
AREÁN, Carlos Antonio: “Argimon en su cuarto giro”. Belarte gallery, Barcelona, 1965.
His work is humanity’s battle and his own.
PUIG, Arnau: “Metafísica y sociedad en torno a una obra de arte que lleva el marchamo Argimon”. Catalogue Argimon. Círculo de la Amistad, Córdoba, January 1968.
Daniel Argimon went to America with his tenebrism, with his paintings full of hidden power, gloom and parsimony of means. On his return, he kept us on tenterhooks and worked intensely behind closed doors. Today, the Institut Français puts us in touch with what we might call a new Argimon. Not a totally transmuted Argimon, one who denies his past, but one who has received the benefit of a proportionate “oxygenation” brought by his contacts with the new schools all over the world and who has been able to assimilate for his own language a whole repertoire of expressive possibilities hitherto unknown to him. The dark, opaque, confused and almost gloomy has become pure colour, in all its possibilities.
GIRALT-MIRACLE, Daniel: “Argimon”. Destino, Barcelona, 22 March 1969.
You can live many lives, or you can go round the day in eighty worlds. That is why, depending on the trip he is on, Argimon makes films, prints books, organises a happening or paints.
RACIONERO, Luis: “Argimon”. Catalogue Panorama de la Plàstica Catalana, Adrià gallery, Barcelona, June 1971.
A dense symbolism marks the work of this artist of Spanish origin. This symbolism is intended to reflect today’s society, its contradictions, its struggles, human oppression, exploitation and repression. Confronted with the problems of our life, this social character is vehemently expressed through different plastic forms and repeated in bright colours: a succession of green and red silhouettes, black and white discs, white clouds, a boot crushing a human form, a black fist suffocating a young body, rifles, raised fists, revolt!
ADAM, Henri: “Argimon”. Les Lettres Françaises, Paris, April 1972.
The passion, of which others have already spoken when referring to Argimon’s work, is present in all the paintings he is exhibiting for the Mexican public. When contemplating them, it is easy to be tempted to name everything in them and say that Argimon is an artist with social concerns. But this would reveal only a part of his pictorial universe. This time, Argimon has set aside newspapers, blinds, lace, and has only resorted to canvas, to colour, to the essence of the figures, above all the human figure, to lead us through a spiritual, painful, magical, expectant world, overwhelmed by enormous boots that put an end to life and dreams. The only response is a cry, which is repeated in some of the paintings, and which is both of despair and a search for solidarity, because no one is safe from the wrath of executioners. While this is happening, the painter does not forget the suns, suns that are like a solitary eye that watches, distant and present at the same time, the drama that unfolds beneath it; in the paintings there are breasts and thighs, presented as an expression of joy, of love for life.
FLORES, M.A.: Mexico, 1972.
Argimon is a man, a restless artist, beset by a continuous desire for anxious research; a frank, sincere and non-conformist spirit; his production is characterised by an absolute mastery of primary colours applied plainly; because, despite his own rebelliousness, his works always have an emotional lyrical sense, a kind, open character, never detached from a fine mordacity and vibrant critical flares.
VALLÉS, Josep: “Argimon”. Tele-Exprés, 16 March 1973.
Argimon’s work is not a series of disconnected paintings, but a continuity of many partial aspects of an aching, living, throbbing totality.
CASTELLET, Josep Maria: “Argimon”. Catalogue Atrium Artis, Geneva, June 1974.
These exhibitions (gallery Seny and gallery Joan Mas, 1976) are of great interest as they allow us to follow the artist’s evolution step by step and to observe that, despite the real differences between his first and last work, this evolution has not been influenced by trends or by accidental changes. On the contrary, it is the result of the analysis of his experiences, of a particular situation, of a nearby reality; an analysis that has led him to a total renewal in his way of expressing the problems and situations that personally preoccupy him.
JULIÁN, Inma: “Daniel Argimon o la búsqueda constante de nuevos medios de comunicación”. Gazeta del Arte, Madrid, 13 June 1976.
In the 1960s, he moved towards a reencounter with the neo-figurative, abandoning the techniques he had used up until then and restricting the composition to an order and the figure to a geometrical technique. From this period onwards, Daniel Argimon’s personality is so strong, so irreducible, that he assimilates all influences creating a unique and personal language.
MOURE, Glòria: “Argimon”. Catalogue Editart, Geneva, December 1977.
In Argimon’s case, we are witnessing a recovery of his informalist period that I think is very important. […] It is a question of certain materials or, rather, of the treatment these materials receive. Specifically, the action of fire, which in the early sixties’ half consumed the papers we saw stuck to the canvases. Nowadays, this technique is integrated into a broader and richer language. For now, we are dealing with realism: not figuration. Argimon uses existing objects, which he manipulates and transforms. These objects may be very different, but they are all unified by fire, which does not consume them, but transfigures them.
CORREDOR MATHEOS, José: “Argimon: la prueba del fuego”. Joan de Serrallonga gallery, Barcelona, October 1978.
His mastery over fire is total, he knows how to handle it to obtain perfect and precise configurations.
IBARZ, Joaquim: “El Museo de Arte Moderno de Ciudad de México presenta una importante exposición de Argimon”. La Vanguardia, Barcelona, 15 July 1984.
Everything is always old and new in Daniel Argimon’s work. A survey of this artist’s extensive oeuvre confronts us with surprise and change and brings us back to an immovable base. Over the years, he has established a game of alternations that range from social protest to aesthetic subtleties, always with a careful treatment of materials. This is the most radical constant in his work, that which gives it unity and continuity. […] Without so many years of direct work with materials it would not be possible to find these works that make us experience a peculiar poetics, since it is not theme —because there is none— nor even reference to it, but the poetics of the materials themselves, of the paper itself and of the colour, worked with great mastery and softness.
MIRALLES, Francesc: “Daniel Argimon”. Argimon, catalogue Biblioteca Maneu, Palma de Mallorca, Quadern n° 3, March 1987.
Slowly but gradually, Daniel Argimon has been recovering his interest in paintings in which the role played by materials is of decisive importance. For almost three years, between 1985 and 1987, the Catalan artist chose to use dense materials, consisting of papier-mâché, in his works […] A constant feature of the works from this period is the wide range of colours used. In some of them there are more than fifty different colours coexisting. The superimposition of different shades of the same colour results in paintings of undoubted appeal….
CIRLOT, Lourdes: Daniel Argimon. Editorial Àmbit, Barcelona, 1988.
Daniel Argimon’s graphic work, now published in its entirety for the first time, complements and expands his pictorial work. Both painting and graphic oeuvre work on the same plane of content and style; it often seems as if Argimon treats the copper plate, the lithographic stone as if it were a piece of paper, as if fingers and brushes were performing the same kind of intervention. In both media, Argimon varies between figuration and abstraction, maintaining a balance between the various realities and their shadows.
BAUERLE, Dorothée: “Zur Graphic von Daniel Argimon”. Catalogue Franz Spiegel Buch, Ulm, 1988.
The Argimon of the eighties sums up, in a certain way, the different stages that have composed his work under the umbrella of wisely manipulated materials. Materials discovered in the fifties, dense, earthy, attacked by graphics and sometimes by the effect of fire. Dark materials related to the Catalan tradition of black painting by Nonell, for example. Materials that will be arranged in images of everyday life in the following decade by means of collage and climbing. Materials, in short, that in recent years have been treated with virtuoso skill and with which the painter has created a whole poetics of the everyday, of the intensely lived human fact, always with great economy of means…
BORRÀS, Maria Lluïsa: “El món poètic de Daniel Argimon”. Catalogue Argimon anys 80, Museu Montsià i Caixa Tarragona, December 1988-January 1989.
The condensed retrospective in Paris shows that there is a coherence —a serene transition— within abstraction and within the usage of “other materials”; but also, that the final work stands out for its greater clarity and transparency.
CABALLERO, Óscar: “Daniel Argimon expone en París sus obras matéricas como testimonio de época”. La Vanguardia, Barcelona, 4 December 1989.
Argimon’s work, which has already been shown all over the world, is remarkable for the fact that it has never succumbed to stylistic facilities. There is no repetition in his work. Instead, it travels through time, opening itself up to it, opened by it, torn apart by it (personal time and History’s time are treated with the same passion), the modulation of a force, made up of rage and humour, and which is achieved thanks to an extreme closeness to the materials.
RAILLARD, Georges: catalogue, Michel Broomhead gallery, November 1989.
He is one of the artists who has done most research into informal language, which he has been intensely linked to in some stages of his trajectory. The experimentation of techniques, the investigation into the behaviour of different materials, the constant innovation of expressive vocabulary, have played a fundamental role in his creation. Pigments, fabrics and papers, harmoniously combined and arranged, give his paintings a sensual and warm texture, bathed in a dark and deep chromaticism.
OLIVER, Conxita: “L’encant d’allò tàctil. El neoinformalisme de Daniel Argimon”. Avui, Barcelona, 7 November 1990.
The Daniel Argimon who works on the pictorial support is in no way different from the one who uses zinc or copper plates or silkscreen printing, or the one who interweaves techniques, inventing new plastic qualities that he puts at the service of his fertile narrative.
GIRALT-MIRACLE, Daniel: “El empirismo gráfico de Daniel Argimon”. Catalogue Museo Nacional de la Estampa, Mexico, August-September 1991.
Perhaps the greatest surprise of Argimon’s latest exhibition is that the painter, who no longer paints to help change the world, has found the very essence of his radical moral indignation at reality. He takes from it what makes it a corrosion of itself, the colours are the worst skin of things, the material excludes the pity of the fingertips. The painter refuses to explain, to explain to himself what he paints now. He does not even give it a title. At the bottom of each painting there could be the telephone number of any barbarism. At the end of the day, each of these paintings is a terminal station which communicates, by the time being, with the origin of the first glances.
VÁZQUEZ MONTALBÁN, Manuel: “Argimon ensimismado”. Catalogue Daniel Argimon, obra reciente, Sala Luzán, Zaragoza, November-December 1991.
This is why I would like to point out that one must immerse oneself in the origins of Daniel Argimon in order to understand his artistic trajectory, which does not go towards the discovery of the new but follows a long journey full of plastic divinations to return to the most intimate part of the being.
CADENA, Josep Maria: “Argimon en el goce de la libertad reencontrada”. Catalogue Banco de Bilbao Vizcaya, Barcelona, 1994.
In 1994 he reached the high point of his last period, marked by a work of enormous intrinsic strength, achieved with sobriety and scant means, the result of a perfect balance between reasoning, sensitivity and intuition. For the first time he opened to the stimulus of the natural environment; phenomena such as rain, night, vegetation, the sea, roads… inspire and give names to his work; almost never before had he given titles to his work, except for those describing the technique used in many paintings of this period.
MEDINA DE VARGAS, Raquel: Argimon íntim. Museu d’art modern de Tarragona.
Daniel Argimon succeeded in creating informalist works of unprecedented beauty, in which textural qualities became the absolute protagonists. In certain paintings Argimon used golden glitter that contrasted energetically with areas reserved for tonalities of different intensity. Referring to this, Juan-Eduardo Cirlot alluded in one of his writings on the artist to the coincidentia oppositorum, whereby luxury and misery, splendid wealth and ashes, were indissolubly linked in Argimon’s painting.
CIRLOT, Lourdes: El País, 23 November 1996.
Argimon was a vital painter, socially committed and supportive of the profession, who in the last years of his life fought to achieve a dignified status for the artist and recognition of his professionalism, founding and re-founding artists’ associations in a tireless struggle, which we will all remember at the head of the FSAP (Federació Sindical d’Artistes Plàstics / Trade Union Federation of Plastic Artists), which has become the Associació d’Artistes Visuals de Catalunya (Association of Visual Artists of Catalonia).
PARCERISAS, Pilar: Avui, 23 November 1996.
For many artists, Informalism was a brief episode, a concession to trends. For others, however, it meant a real change in the pictorial paradigm, an aesthetic revolution. This is the case of Daniel Argimon, whose work is as coherent as it is open to experimentation, devoid of all frivolity and based on a very specific language, with its plastic and moral values.
MITRANI, Àlex: Catalogue Inter Atrium, Barcelona, 2004.
Death interrupted an existence happily prolonged in his works, a simple but admirable life, in its authenticity and fullness.
MEDINA DE VARGAS, Raquel: Argimon íntim, Museu d’art modern de Tarragona, 1998.