Spanish painter Pablo Segarra Chias, was born in 1945 in Seville, a city impoverished and devastated by the recent Spanish civil war, Pablo lived in the Macarena District in the heart of the city.
Local craftsmen taught him to use oil, turpentine, varnish and a mixture of them, from time to time supplying him with brushes, canvases and oil paints, marveled at his natural abilities at such a young age. At 13, Pablo got a job at a local cemetery, retouching photographs of the dead before restoring the headstones. At 18 he entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Seville, founded in 1660 by the great master Murillo.
He studied the methods of the masters of the past and the knowledge gained helped him develop his own style. A true love for classical art originated under the influence of artists such as Murillo, Zurbarana, García Ramos, Gonzalo Bilbao and Gomez Gil. After completing his studies, he went to North Africa, namely Morocco, where he was absorbed in the traditions of the people of this country, which never ceased to amaze him with its secrets and exoticism.
Chais’s paintings delight with flowers, characters’ clothes and plots. His works are full of veiled beauty that always leaves room for imagination. Chais’ themes make him one of the best “oriental” artists in the western world. The number of paintings is very limited due to the deep and meticulous work put into each one. He has been featured in his native Spain, United Arab Emirates, America and the United Kingdom.
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He was born in Seville on November 4, 1945. From a very young age he showed great interest in drawing. He created his first painting at age 7 and began a path of vocation and efforts that lead him to this day.
In the early sixties he enrolled in the School of Arts And Crafts of Seville, attending three courses of artistic drawing, where he achieved very good results. Then as a copyist he attended the Provincial Museum of Seville, having been directed by the famous Alfonso Grosso, and there he made copies of Murillo, Zurbarán, Virgilio Martoni, Villegas, Gomez Gil and many other and varied artists that contributed to nourish his artistic training.
With this basis, he tended towards a realistic and bright artistic style, finding his own clients through auctions and other sales channels.
In 1985 he exhibited for the first time in Sevilla in the Sadartys gallery living in later years in Leon, Palma de Mallorca and Madrid Duran room several times. He also participated in various art fairs and international events.
Currently his works are spread all over several countries in Europe, America and Asia.
Because I am not an specialist in art critic, I find it difficult to express my thoughts about this artwork, being creation itself the authentic form of direct expression we all know. In any case, the current standard is to comment and criticise among us, the same artist of the field. But on this occasion, I will talk with great pleasure about my good friend and fellow PABLO S. CHIAS, who always dignified values, and in generous measure, in the work of others.
In his themes there are attitudes and characters reminiscent of the luminous Eastern Spain, figures contrasted brilliantly by light that raises characters within a compositional and colorful aesthetic. For those, he gets the inspiration from his immediate surroundings, and his frecuent trips to Maghreb.
The setting up of his work invites us both to the art of the know-how and to a quality thematic content.
These special skills have been achieved through his perseverance and investigative spirit; A person who is so valued both by his art and human behavior receives these gifts naturally.
For my part, I congratulate him for his successes in this passionate way of the arts, the magic of which encloses the complex world of creativity.
Francisco Borrás
Professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts
University of Seville
Painting is basically a tribute to light. There is no light without painting. The darkness is the negation of color. In this regard the pursuit of southern light has always been a longing for painters. The contrasts of colors created by the daylight streaming in ascending and descending scales from sunrise to sunset. A range of colors and a fleeting, but timeless, development of light and shadow. There is were the painting is born. But CHIA, with that undeniable virtuosity for capturing the color of an illuminated landscape, does not conform to the impersonal mimetic reproduction of it. For he considers nature amounts to nothing without human presence. A human presence that the painter seeks not in a fictional situation, but in a real and primal communion between nature and humans.
ANTIQUARIA
CHIAS paintings are made with an illuminating sense of color. Gold, white and carmine are his favorite colors, which best serve him to craft his compositions, always carried out by the proper disposition of the points of light, essentially.
However, few have been the critics who have seen -and this is one of his most indisputable successes- the compositional importance of shadows as markers of a figure or revitalizers of a landscape, such as a plastic projection of an image that without their presence would acquire a plain tone. CHIAS does not impose shadows, but he suggests them as a way of painting, as a matting component, raised as an indirect formulation.
CHIAS makes Morocco and Andalusia share lights of both sea and deserts, a world in which the warm sensations are the clear manifestation of a kind of well crafted painting, geared towards the contemplation of beauty.
C. GARCIA-OSUNA
Ben Ammar (son of Ammar) was a poet of the eleventh century who lived in Seville. PAUL S. CHIAS collects in his paintings the essence of a land with strong Muslim reminiscences. CHIAS lavishes his canvases with warm and clean colors, depicting his particular universe of austere forms and simple people, immersed in their everyday and constant routine, ever-present in the spiritual life of the author and beautifully depicted in his paintings.
BARRIO DE SALAMANCA, 1994
What school can we ascribe the work of PABLO S. CHIAS to? At first glance we could relate him to Sorolla, because his artwork is full of light, immersed in it, but not luminist. In this aspect PABLO S. CHIAS could be considered as an impressionist, since his work appears to be an analysis of light and colors.
But immediately we see that the figures that stand under the charms of this light are modeled without that Mediterranean rippling in which the forms are undone and the colors are defined with loose brush strokes. The speech here is more solid, and above all, things and figures are offered with a more realistic embodiment.
It is precisely for this reason, for the detailed relationship of the parts with the whole, that we see PABLO S. CHIAS within this new realism that has been expanded by the penultimate Sevillian School, for which the world is but a detailed event to be retained as a testimony. Neither matters if PABLO S. CHIAS alternates his own chronic of immediate reality with evocations, nor that, – as Fortuny, and Matisse would later- he feels attracted by the richness of colour of the Arab world.
AM CAMPOY
We can say that PABLO S. CHIAS is a paradigm within this type of painting so consistently underrated by critics as valued by the public, where everything is beautiful and perfect, both regarding the issue and execution .
We are talking about an artwork, which is, in short, incriticable. It is the result of an eye who can see beauty in things and recreate it on the canvas, the work of a serious painter whose technique mastery is total.
POINT, 1994