Crossroads is a digital art project conceived between the years 2000 and 2002, developed using Adobe Flash technology, at a time when this platform enabled the exploration of new forms of interaction on the Internet. In its original conception, the piece offered the user an immersive experience, articulated through a non-linear visual and narrative structure.
In August 2015, one month after the passing of my friend Pepe Gutiérrez, I carried out the action Dismantling a Mandala at the Fernán Pérez mill (Almería). Conceived as an intimate tribute, this intervention explored the relationship between sound, memory, and transience, in harmony with the Tibetan Buddhist practice that Pepe followed. The interior of the mill was transformed into a farewell setting, where the music from my guitar engaged in a dialogue with the gradual dissolution of the mandala...
In Stages for a Journey the artist proposes an initiatory journey through a triad of spaces, objects or scenarios that invite the experience of art as a pilgrimage to reach sacredness, immortality, absolute reality or the search for a center as utopia. Between alchemy and esotericism, Oriol Espinal presents the labyrinth as an imago mundi, and its center as a symbol of the absolute purpose of man or the image of paradise.
Codex Viatoris occupies, within Scenarios for a Journey, the axial position of a sanctuary-book. Embedded in the sculpture Shelter for Walkers, its placement at the very core of the cubic structure endows the work with the status of both geometric and symbolic center. Enclosed beneath the cover bearing a circle of scales—an unmistakable allusion to the sleeping dragon—the book could only be opened after a liminal experience: passing through the narrow gate, traversing the floor labyrinth, and culminating at the central altar.
The exhibition The Poems I Will Never Write was presented in parallel to the installation The Purity of Your Smile. Although it was installed on the upper floor of the mill and its formal conception is completely different from the proposal exhibited on the ground floor, both share the same starting point: a poem from my book Peripheries, in this case a sonnet whose title gives the exhibition its name. Composed of fourteen deliberately pompous and empty lines - though not without a certain aesthetic brilliance - the sonnet is no more than a list of titles of collections of poems that might one day exist, though I will not be the one to take on the commitment of providing them with content...
Quadern de nit (Night Notebook) is a book conceived as an inseparable part of the sculpture The Chasm of the Freedmen, the third piece of the cycle Scenarios for a Journey. It is presented as the testimony left by the visionary who, after an inner journey, returns transformed to shared reality. Each double page of the volume articulates a dual structure: on the even pages, sequential drawings representing the progression of the steps of the ascending spiral; and on the odd ones, a poetic text that establishes a dialogue among multilingual voices.
The commission from the Oficina de Gestió de Monuments de la Generalitat de Catalunya arose with the purpose of improving the versatility of the apsidal space of the Collegiate Church of Sant Vicenç de Cardona. Given its frequent use as a concert hall and recording room for early music, the new altar had to combine a profound symbolism with the necessary functionality to facilitate its relocation.
A stranger knocked on my door one autumn afternoon. He handed me an envelope filled with verses and entrusted me with a task subject to unusual conditions. Before leaving, he wrote on the doorframe: “Matter spins and the spirit rests.” From that improbable encounter emerged the four books and the calligram I presented in this exhibition in 1996. Final Cantos is the result of a task dictated on the threshold of wakefulness, where what was dreamt would ultimately take on tangible matter and visible form.
Chamber of Solitude is an installation project that recreates the scenography in which the poet —embodied in the figure of the viewer— embarks on an itinerary that leads him to delve into himself: into his jungle, his sea, his cave. It consists of three stages of an initiatory journey —a threshold, a center, and an altarpiece— represented through three sculptural pieces.
The installation The Water and the Silence is structured as a transdisciplinary proposal that explores the intersection between the visual, the textual, and the sonic. From a phenomenological perspective, the work invites a process of signification in which each of these languages emerges and converges into a systemic unity, operating under a logic of semantic interdependence. In this sense, the elements that comprise it cannot be dissociated without losing their expressive and hermeneutic potential.
Observatory of the Origin proposes a reflection on the act of observing and the transformation of inner experience when translated into material representation. The piece is structured around a dialectic between the eye and the gaze, the inside and the outside, light and shadow, challenging the viewer not merely as a passive observer, but as an active participant in a perceptual and symbolic process.
The Waters is a project conceived as a visual meditation on time and cosmic order — or disorder. Through the symbolic representation of water in its multiple forms and meanings, it is articulated as a large-scale triptych — three paintings on paper, each measuring 200 x 200 cm — where a poetics of fluidity, cyclicality, and the transcendence of the universe unfold.
From the most primitive cultures to the present day, the figure of the dragon - Drache in German - has been a universal symbol that has endured both in the East and in the West. It embodies both the myth of the monster and the representation of the devil, as well as the image of the animal or that which is animal in ourselves. With the name Drache, Oriol Espinal has titled his most recent body of work...
The Eye of gold (L’ull d’or) is a book-object conceived as the symbolic nucleus of the Tabernacle for a Manual, one of the pieces presented in the exhibition Scenarios for a Journey. Kept inside this sculptural tabernacle, it appears as a territory of restricted access whose opening entails a gesture of ritual transgression. Its sequence of sixteen pages is arranged in four rows of four elements each, forming a kind of stanza of a visual poem in which image, word, and color are intertwined.
Presented within the framework of the exhibition Final Cantos, as well the other three books in the series, Final Cantos, Book I is built under the sign of a dreamlike, Borgesian narrative: an anonymous visitor bursts into the artist’s studio and delivers two envelopes —one with sixty-six anaphoric verses in Catalan, the response-verse “It is time to erect the temple,” and eleven loose letters that would eventually form the title Cants Finals; the other with an esoteric diagram setting the rules of the work.
In her introductory text for the Unity exhibition, art critic Maria Lluïsa Borràs wrote: In the work of Oriol Espinal, the word is both content and form, theme and structure, a morphology of the verb —the sacred word “capable —as the artist himself says— of generating its own graphic heart and, at the same time, the periphery that frames and protects it.” In the various preparatory studies, as well as in the final version of this unsettling and enigmatic work, Espinal draws on two images: the word and the hand. Two elements from which arises a contrast between unified thought and uniform thought.
The Rumor of Other Worlds is a piece created specifically for the collective exhibition Para Goya. The work’s uniqueness lies in a conceptual interplay of chalcographic techniques; for the portrait, I drew upon an original print of the self-portrait with which the Aragonese painter preludes his Los Caprichos series.
In August 2013, I composed the poem La pureza de tu sonrisa (The purity of your smile) in different scenarios in Cabo de Gata. Two years later, I used it as the conceptual axis of a multidisciplinary exhibition that integrated music, poetry, photography, drawing and sculpture. The exhibition, which bore the same title as the poem, explored the implicit interconnection between the arts and how a genre, in this case poetry, can shift and transform into other forms of expression, generating an interdisciplinary "body" whose elements dialogue with each other while maintaining their expressive autonomy.
The paintings in the Flight to the Center series stem from an urgent need to flee—not outward, but toward the innermost core of the self. Far from escapism, this body of work proposes an introspective journey in which existential suffocation transforms into a search for meaning. Through the isolated figure, symbolic space, and suspended gesture, the paintings speak of trance, spiritual struggle, and creative action. In this passage, the artist places themself in a realm where fleeing from the self becomes a return to a transformed self—a deeper, more serene form of consciousness.
In 2018, with the aim of rescuing my grandfather, the painter and collector Marian Espinal, from oblivion, I developed a website dedicated to promoting his work. The platform offers a catalog of his paintings and art collection, as well as making available his complete correspondence and other information. Through this compilation, the website not only preserves his legacy but also provides a fundamental tool for researchers and scholars of Catalan art.
The purpose of the installation Molino en Fragmento was to explore the relationship between the represented object and its own representation through photography. To this end, I arranged images on the inside face of the mill that captured details of its exterior. This procedure established a specular link in which the mill, in addition to being the object represented, simultaneously became the material support of its own image. In this way, I sought to articulate two dimensions of the same entity that, despite coexisting, remained alien to each other, without the possibility of discerning whether anything existed beyond their respective interior and exterior spaces.