In the 1990s, Guinovart’s career enjoyed widespread recognition both in Spain, where he was awarded the National Visual Arts Prize in 1982, and in France, where he received the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1984. In 1995, the year when this work was created, ACCA (Association of Arts Critics of Catalonia), awarded him its prize for Espai Guinovart.

There is a preponderance of blue in Sidi. A colour particularly recurrent in Guinovart’s practice at that time, blue had a strong symbolic meaning for him ever since his youth, when he first came across the ultramarine blue for washing among paint cans when working at his family’s workshop. He was also influenced by the blue of the Mediterranean Sea, which he saw from his studio in Castelldefels and in his recurrent journeys to Greece, Algeria and Tunisia. Besides these tones of blue we could also add the particular hue seen in the doors and windows of the Tunisian village of Sidi Bou Said, whose inhabitants use this colour to protect themselves from illness and evil spirits.

In his works Guinovart uses materials removed from conventional painting, treating them as yet another element in his visual world, and he paid particular attention to waste or found materials. On the right of this composition, an interesting and particularly subtle work, a grid of pieces of wood of unknown origin is arranged to form a semicircle. Ovals and semicircles are recurrent figures in this artist’s oeuvre, and critics have associated them with the sun, the moon and the cycles of harvests that were so familiar to him.