20th-21st Century Spanish

Although this Valencia-born painter spent most of his life in Madrid, he always stayed true to his roots in the Mediterranean.

Those close to Almela define him as a seasoned traveller. His countless journeys to Asia and his fascination with the cultures he encountered motivated his experimentation with Oriental influenced motifs.

Many of his works are rendered in monochrome gradations and forms that straddle figuration and abstraction, in ways recalling the paintings by Mark Rothko (1903-1970). It is also possible to trace in his work a certain affinity with the still lifes by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906).

Landscape and still life are in fact the mainstay of his work. In the latter he played with volumes and colour, leaving some objects blank, thus turning the void into a figure. As the artist himself declared: “in my paintings, the background becomes a figure, not only physically (the unpainted primed canvas) but also visually. Unpainted blank spaces are the figures in the painting, whereas what has been intervened, what has physical matter, paint, is the visual background of my works”.

Almela has had several solo exhibitions in major galleries such as Egam in Madrid and Galería Val i 30 in Valencia; he has also been shown in group exhibitions in Madrid and in Switzerland, Belgium, Mexico and Egypt, among other countries.

In 2013, the IVAM (Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno) paid tribute to Almela in an interesting posthumous exhibition that was very well received by the critics and raised awareness of a substantial part of his artistic legacy.