The most interesting pictorial series presented at Caixa de Catalunya by Marfá corresponds to the watercolors of Venice. This collection consists of small and medium format papers, where it presents urban scenes of ancient Venice, without capturing the modern part of the Italian immortal city, Mestre, or the industrial area of it. This need to focus on the old part of Venice is due to its romantic search attitude and also to description of subtle and especially cared for environments. In this sense Marfá adopts the attitude of observer of reality, and then summarizes all the sensations in a few strokes that subsequently ends in the study. There is an essential search for the states of the soul through the stones, which form Venetian architecture.

In other words, the urbanity of his watercolor works is due to the humanity that perspires the buildings, reflecting a recent past that the painter resists forgetting, although neither does his work possess any symbolist intentionality.

Clean, intense and dark colors predominate, without them offering an ambiguous image, but quite the opposite. It is worth noting the range of blues, reds, blacks, browns, oranges, reds and greens.

This Venice series is divided into two distinct parts:

the notes, made quickly “in situ”, made in black and colored pencil or wax afterwards, where the agility of the stroke and the incidence of color, turn off its descriptive force, and the series of watercolors and medium format cakes together with several oil paintings made from some of these initial notes, where their ease for drawing struggles to impose itself above his quality as a painter.

In short Marfá presents two approaches that are repeated throughout its artistic activity: its skills for drawing, with landscape works where the strength of detail is contemplated, and its willingness to combine colors within dynamic approaches. He is a born color experimenter, as he considers it essential for pictorial research.

In this sense Marfá, in an earlier era, even tries to reach abstract approaches through the chromatic experimentation of matter, Marfá also demonstrates at this stage his qualities as a creative and experimental painter, to the point that some of the pieces of this current are of a higher quality than that of pictorial works of his landscape stage.

It also presents cakes on paper, which are usually more metheric, but at the same time more gestural, trying to capture the atmospheres of Venice’s cityscapes, formed not only by the contrast of the sky with the sheet of water, but by 1st presence of the chromatisms of the buildings combined in the distance with the colors of the sky and the chromatic reflections of the houses and palaces in the water. It’s all movement and color, but in reality, the city of Venice remains calm. And hence its watercolors are densely coloured too because the environment is too. Venice, the city of the poetic density of silence.

Marfá presented in his exhibition Caixa de Catalunya, Sala d’Art Sant Jordi, on Manila Street in Barcelona, during last September, a collection of oil, cakes and watercolors based in Venice and the Ramblas of Barcelona. He emphasizes, especially in the watercolors and oil paintings of Venécia, his research of the stain of color, his expressive chromatism and the agility and fleetingness of the strokes, which despite their material appearance, are denser and subtler than concentrated. While, in the series of Las Ramblas de Barcelona innovates, with regard to the angles from which it paints, characterized by its originality.