Biography

Painter, sculptor, and universal expressionist artist, Antonio Peris Carbonell was born in Valencia, Spain, in 1957. He showed a remarkable artistic ability from an early age and painted one of his first works, La Caravana, when he was 12 years old. He studied drawing at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios de Valencia (Valencia School of Arts) and, in 1976, was admitted to the San Carlos Fine Arts School, also in Valencia.
After serving in the military in 1978, Peris Carbonell participated in several national art competitions and won a total of seven first prizes, including one for sculpture. His work at this point was still academic, but his charcoal drawings were already showing a unique, reflective style. He continued to focus on the human body and began experimenting with collage and India ink techniques.

In 1980 he married Maria Celda at the Royal Monastery of El Puig in Valencia, Spain, and completed his first series of expressionist paintings entitled Cemeteries and Burnt Mountains. A year later, in 1981, he painted a series of spiritual portraits for a minor community of Capuchin friars. His style acquires a luminosity, purity and spiritual essence that carries through various series of paintings, and he starts to incorporate symbolism, graphic and calligraphic elements in the images. The objective is the expression of the essence of the soul, through the color, abstraction and symbolism. In addition to this figurative work, he begins to study landscape in 1984. His daughter María was born in December.

In 1985 the artist had his first solo exhibition of collages and acrylic paintings. The show was very well received by both, critics and the public and all the pieces were sold within two days. He had two more individual exhibitions in Spain during that year and then traveled abroad in 1986 and 1987 to work and study art at museums in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Egypt and England. Egypt and Paris, in particular, inspired a new sense of light in his work.
The first book about his work, Peris Carbonell, Obras 1976-1987, was published in 1988 in four languages and presented to the International Critics of Art in Madrid, gaining him recognition as a representative of contemporary Spanish mystic expressionism.

He worked and exhibited regularly in Spain, England and the Netherlands from 1988-1990, being inspired by every new location and still continuing his series and collections of mystical paintings, many of them focused on the Face of Christ. In April of 1990, the artist and his family traveled to Rome for a semi-private audience with Pope John Paul II, one of the most significant moments in the artist’s life. Peris Carbonell presented the Pontiff an oil painting of The Face of Christ during His Passion, which the artist said was created without a model and based entirely on an expression of a deep “inner feeling”.
After a solo exhibition in May 1991 at the Galeria Chrysmart of Arles in France, the work of Peris Carbonell began to become internationally known when a French art critic proclaimed him to belong to the long line of great Iberian artists. A monologue entitled Conocer a Peris Carbonell (A Meeting with Peris Carbonell) was also published the same year in London by M. Quintanilla and presented at the Galeria El Ensanche in Valencia by noted art critic, Rafael Pons. Peris Carbonell also began painting French seascapes and organizing exhibitions of his sacred art at the Peyrade church in France. His first exhibition of sacred art at the Peyrade Church, was bought in its entirety by a French art collector.

In 1992 he finished the 14 canvases of his Via Crucis series for the Capuchin Friars Church in Valencia, two oil on canvas for the Royal Monastery of El Puig, and started a series of 20 semi-circular panels on the life of St. Francis of Assisi for the cloister of the Convent de la Magdalena, also in Valencia. A retrospective exhibition of his works from 1982-1992 was held in the Tarbouriech Room at the Musee Paul Valery in Sete, France during the summer of that year, and the museum acquired some of his pieces for its permanent collection.  
The following year, Peris Carbonell unveiled his series on the life of St. Francis of Assisi for the cloister of the Convent de la Magdalena in Valencia and traveled to France to inaugurate his 14 paintings of the Via Crucis for La Grande Motte church. He finished his second painting for the Royal Monastery of El Puig and a room in the monastery is dedicated to his works, including the 14 paintings of the Via Crucis series.
In May of 1994, Peris Carbonell was proclaimed a Knight of the Royal Order of Santa Maria del Puig (Spain) and later traveled to Rome and Assisi where he began a series of 100 paintings about the lives of Saint Francis and Santa Clara for the Franciscan Museum in Rome. He finished the series in September 1994 and a book featuring these paintings, ‘Francesco e Clara: Un Avventura Evangelica Sognata Insieme (Francis and Clara: An Evangelical Adventure Dreamed Together), by Alessandro Pronzato, with commentary by Father Francisco Iglesias, is published at the same time. Peris Carbonell continued working and exhibiting in Spain, Italy, France, and Switzerland during the next few years. In 1995, he finished the 20 panels for the Convent de la Magdalena the same year, and in 1996 completed the La Vida de Jesus (The Life of Jesus) series (begun in 1992, 103 paintings) and 40 paintings on the life of St. Francis of Assisi for a Spanish collector.

He traveled to Norway for the first time in 1999 and produced a body of work about the city of Oslo. Later that year he moved into a new form of expression working in stained glass for the windows of the Nuestra Señora de la Esperanza church in Teruel, Spain and a book about his works for the church, written by Jeronimo Beltran, was published in 2000.

He continued working in this medium and produced windows for the Capuchin Friars Convent in Alicante, Spain (2001) as well as for the dome of the Hotel Olympia de Alboraya in Valencia, 530 m2 (2002), and the crystal dome for the Hotel Solvasa in Barcelona (2004).

The artist also produced various series of paintings and exhibited his work in several countries between 1996 and 2004, focusing primarily on mystical and religious subjects, and exploring new topics and media such as watercolors, sailboats, amusement parks, bullfighting, and still life.

In 2005, he returned to sculpture and produced a 9.7 x 1.85 meter aluminum panel and other interior decoration for the Solvasa Hotels in Barcelona and Valencia. His sculpture, Paisaje Nocturno (Night Landscape) was produced in bronze in an edition of seven in 2006 and he created his first painted crystal sculpture with motion, Cosmos, in 2007
Peris Carbonell visited the United States for the first time in 2008 and also finished 27 panels for the Franciscan Friars of Santo Espiritu del Monte in Valencia. In 2009 he began working on some large sculptural pieces and crystal artwork. He finished the decoration of the Hotel Solvasa of Mazagon in Huelva, Spain, in 2010 and, motivated by this large project, he began to mix architecture into his other artwork.
In 2011, he finished the 25 m2 iron and steel panel Christo a Traves del Tiempo (Christ through Time) for the Virgen del Temedal hermitage in Teruel, Spain, as well as a similar panel of Saint Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio for the Franciscan Friars of Concentaina in Alicante. He also visited the USA and Italy later that year and traveled to Fortaleza, Brazil in the summer to open an exhibition of his paintings, Peris Carbonell, um Mestre das Cores (Peris Carbonell, a Master of Colors). His work was well received by Brazilian architects and engineers and he is now considering future collaborative projects following his concept of architecture as “a sculpture where people are integrated“.
The Peris Carbonell Museum was opened to the public in July 2012 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. The permanent exhibition displays a collection of paintings and sculptures created by the artist since 1999.
The artist frequently travels to the USA, being especially inspired in his artworks by the urban landscapes of New York city.