Academic Training

At the age of fifteen he began his academic training at the Girona Association with introductory classes to drawing and oil landscapes.

In the sixties he set up a studio in Palla street in Barcelona and became part of the avant-garde community of Barcelona. Saint Lluc Artist's Circle was a regular haunt where he learned to perfect his drawing technique, especially with regards to nudes.

From 1970 onwards he spent lengthy periods living in Paris. He often visited museums and galleries and made oil and gouache paintings of the Seine, the Latin Quarter and  Montparnasse amongst others. Paris has always been a great inspirational source for him and frequent stays there have allowed him to keep in touch with its artistic and cultural world.

In 1978 in Sant Cugat del Vallès's International School of Mural Painting he took a course in fresco painting. His visits to and stays in Ampordà, Castille, Maestrat, Asturias, Alpujarras as well as England, Italy, Holland, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Russia, America, China, Thailand, Turkey and Morocco have subsequently left their mark on his work.

He settled for good in Barcelona in the eighties. From then on he regularly had his work exhibited in various Catalonian galleries as well as in Spanish cities such as Madrid, Mallorca and Gijon and also in Europe, in Venice and Aachen. Nowadays he divides his time between the Amargós Sreet studio in the Old Quarter of Barcelona and the Priorat countryside.

He was defined by the art critic Rafael Manzano in the following way:

I would venture to say that Benet Sarsanedas is a complex painter, both simple yet straightforward at the same time. He was born in Rupit, a clearcut example of "Old Catalonia", but his concept of landscape differs from the tradition of the so called "Catalan School". Consequently, I have classified him in a book of mine as "heterodox".

In Nature he does not seek prettiness, the superficial values, that outer skin which has led so many careers astray. Like Cezanne once said of his own work, Benet Sarsanedas is equally concerned with "going beneath what is visible", penetrating the landscape to bring out its deepest, inner traits. The significance and character of his work, therefore, rightfully place him among the expressionists.

That tailoring of his palette to the hidden meanings of objects is transmitted to his canvas in themes which create an effect of timelessness: old cities, broad and austere vistas, and towers that seem like storks nests. Benet Sarsanedas resists the temptation of colour pyrotechnics and chooses a language in which grey, "the only colour in Nature", as Pisarro once wrote to Cezanne, predominates.

The settings of this painter never evoke peace and quiet. Those clouds foreshadow a violent storm, those trees await an uncontrollable wind, the rocks in those fields "seem to be dreaming", as Machado wrote. A Sarsanedas canvas never leaves one indifferent. There is in it that "drama" without which, as Picasso pointed out, the work of art fades away. (1987)