Enrique Mestre-Jaime is a Spanish painter born in Barcelona in 1968. He studied Fine Art at the Sant Jordi Faculty of the University of Barcelona, where he specialised in painting and graduated in 1992. An independent artist, he collaborates with numerous art galleries and cultural centres in France and Spain, constantly drawing inspiration from nature and human landscapes through painting, printmaking and illustration. A citizen of the world yet deeply rooted in the Mediterranean, he lives and works between Barcelona and the Balearic Islands, with a studio on the island of Menorca.
His international career has been built over decades of solo and group exhibitions, from Barcelona to Bangkok, from Paris to New York, including numerous French galleries with which he maintains long-standing relationships. His works feature in public and private collections in Spain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, Poland, Taiwan and Thailand.
A renowned illustrator, between 2001 and 2019 he designed the covers for numerous books by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, for the publishers Plaza & Janés, Random House Mondadori and Penguin Random House.
‘I am a painter… I look at life, I observe nature… and I paint them. I paint water, flowers, the sea, birds, sometimes architecture, an island, a piece of history, a market, sometimes a face, a gesture, a silhouette… And my passions and concerns are many: travel, human geographies, the destruction of the planet, pollution… Feelings and emotions give soul to painting. We must create living art, with soul, not empty and cold… that is the challenge and the goal for me, the pleasure and the difficulty.”
Water is the central element of his work — its abundance or absence, its beauty and fragility. It manifests itself in the form of boats, canoes or the heads of desert animals, evoking the beauty of nature, rivers, or even the intensive fishing with which man is emptying the oceans. His deep interest in ecology and the protection of nature runs through all his work.
Acrylic is the most common medium in Enrique Mestre-Jaime’s paintings. He works on canvas, but also on unexpected surfaces — linen, paper, skin — which give each series its own texture and identity. His work also extends to lithography and illustration, disciplines he practises with the same rigour as painting. His most iconic series explore geographical and symbolic territories: Océanos, African Maps, Asia on Paper, Blue Posidonia, Galapagos Islands and Africas on Linen.
His pictorial style combines the precision of a draughtsman, the chromatic richness of a colourist and a deep ecological awareness, making each canvas both a sensory journey and a discreet manifesto for the beauty of life.
