To have a show devoted to Antoni Llena (b. 1942) at a prestigious Barcelona gallery is significant for a number of reasons. Since the early ’60s Llena has been a very peculiar representative of contemporary Catalan art, in the sense that he has remained in the vanguard but always detached from its noisy celebrations. The quality of his work, not always mentioned or recognized, has been consistently high, even more when more mimetical styles have been dominant. In the early ’60s, only a few years after the violent explosion of Catalan informalism, a new movement began in Barcelona. Progressive