Twenty canvases from a painter who is, to us, unknown, so to speak, are displayed at the gallery on the first floor of the Georges Giroux Gallery.

Carlos Nadal is a Spaniard born in Paris to Spanish parents, now married to a Belgian and currently residing in our country.

His life in Paris and the modern French school naturally influenced him; Utrillo seems to have made an impact but no more so than other painters of cityscapes, half realistic, half poetic, as we often see.

But Nadal has something that can be called his own from now on and that is his colour. No Frenchman feels colour like him. Nadal’s colour is full of moods, he is eloquent and warm and wild and sustained. Thus he comes closer to the Flemish school (it’s strange to make these parallels between the Spanish self and the Flemish one), yet it is different. It is less attached, less gloomy from the point of view of the palette of many Flemish painters. Brighter harmonies appear without becoming neither weak nor aggressive. Nadal is a painter who knows the art of colour and conceives it in his own way.

A strange feeling is evoked when the streets, squares and corners of Brussels, Antwerp and other cities are seen in such unusual yet such precise colours.

The colour might seem a bit messy when Nadal overloads his composition. But when everything superfluous is put aside and he focuses synthetically on the essential shape, the “the climate of the soul” of a street or a square, he proves himself a truly important painter.

Carlos Nadal is still relatively young, gifted with qualities for painting, with a very personal conception, who, as his personality develops, no doubt has an important future before him.

Standard (Brussels – 1949)