Ignacio Trelis

Ignacio Trelis is a Spanish contemporary painter, born in 1960, who has exhibited widely in Spain and once ran his own gallery in Valencia. He started out as a landscape painter and later turned to large, brightly colored portraits of people from many cultures, set against abstract fields of pattern and symbol. Our catalogue includes a painting titled Requiem that has been credited to him, although that attribution is uncertain.

Life and training

Little about Trelis's life has been published beyond gallery biographies, so this account stays close to them. He grew up, by his own account, in a family that loved art, and he was drawn early to the 19th-century Spanish painters who worked in Rome, above all Marià Fortuny (1838–1874) of Reus. Fortuny's glittering, finely detailed genre scenes made him one of the most admired painters in Europe in the 1860s and 1870s, and Trelis has described himself as a follower of that school.

He studied at local art academies, and one of his teachers was the Valencian painter Paco Barrachina, who became a lasting friend. He also describes himself as largely self-taught: his style grew from copying and studying the techniques of other painters rather than from a single academy.

From landscapes to portraits

Trelis first made his name with landscapes and exhibited extensively across Spain. According to his UK dealer, he moved away from landscape partly because younger painters had begun imitating his style. He started traveling in search of new subjects, and the result was the body of work he is now known for: a series of portraits of people from different cultures.

These portraits share a recognizable formula. A realistically painted face and costume, often a single figure close up, sits within a surround of vivid abstract shapes and flat color. Those shapes are not decoration for its own sake: they represent symbols drawn from the sitter's cultural tradition. The series includes tribal warriors from Papua, Japanese women in kimonos inspired by The Tale of the Heike, an Indian holy man in Sadhu, Varanasi, and Dionysian figures associated with Bacchus. Some recent works use gold leaf; others are reclining nudes in the tradition of the odalisque.

The interest in costume, jewelry, body art and headwear shows his debt to Fortuny and the 19th-century Orientalist tradition. The abstract settings are his own addition, and they place his work between academic realism and contemporary decorative painting. His current phase, as he describes it, combines abstraction with traditional figurative painting.

Requiem

The painting called Requiem in our catalogue is a crowded danse macabre in which Death, robed in white, plays the violin above a whirl of red devils, monks, nobles and tormented souls. It has been circulated online under Trelis's name. Its style is quite different from his documented portraits, and we have not found the work in his dealers' listings, so the attribution should be treated as unconfirmed until it can be checked with the artist or a gallery.

The theme has a long history: the Dance of Death, in which a skeleton or a personified Death leads people of every rank to the grave, goes back to late medieval murals. See our guides to the danse macabre and death in art, and the charcoal Danse Macabre drawings of the English artist Paul Rumsey.

Where to see his work

Trelis's paintings are sold through commercial galleries, including Callaghans of Shrewsbury in England, and online art platforms. There are no public museum holdings we can confirm.