Toni Garau (1974), a visual artist and designer born in Sóller, Mallorca, creates a body of work where art, design, and collective memory intertwine with sensitivity and a profound emotional charge. His ever-evolving creative universe moves across different media and hybrid techniques, giving rise to a poetic language in which matter transforms into symbol.
From a very young age, Garau felt a natural attraction to art, perceiving it as a path of personal expression and inner exploration. For him, creating is inhabiting an intimate space where he can give shape to his questions, emotions, and experiences.
Toni Garau’s early years of training took place between Palma and Barcelona, where he studied industrial design and, later, graphic design. However, from the very beginning, he felt the need to cultivate his more artistic side as well. Alongside his studies, he delved into the world of oil painting and ceramics, exploring with curiosity and commitment his most expressive dimension. In the early 2000s, he embarked on his artistic path more decisively, experimenting with oil, acrylic, and marble dust. These early works, dense in texture and open to formal experimentation, marked the beginning of an aesthetic quest that soon became more intimate. Watercolor emerged as a new medium of expression, and through it, Garau approached the study of the male body. In its forms, he discovered a symbolic and honest space from which to explore his sexuality, approached with subtlety, sensuality, and a deeply personal gaze.
At the same time, Garau ventured into digital art, a fertile ground for his restless vision. Inspired by the shadows cast by plants, he began to create abstract compositions that, after digital processing, dissolved the natural reference and transformed it into new visual landscapes. This stage revealed a sensitivity to the ephemeral, to form, and to emptiness.
Between 2006 and 2013, Toni Garau focused his attention on design, a discipline that allowed him to expand his visual language beyond the canvas. His artistic sensitivity translated into the textile field, where he developed prints with a strong aesthetic presence and a unique personality, inspired by the rhythms and forms of nature. These designs, printed on silk—a delicate and noble material—captured the subtlety of his line and his mastery of color. His visual universe—organic, intuitive, and emotional—was not limited to textiles: it also began to unfold in furniture, interior, and decorative design, where his aesthetic vision found new ways of inhabiting space.
In 2010, his practice took a decisive turn. As a graphic designer, he embarked with a team of historians on a publishing project that investigated the industrial past of Sóller. In his search for images, documents, and testimonies, Garau discovered the profound impact of the Industrial Revolution on the town’s life. He was particularly moved by the role of women: many of them gained access for the first time to paid work in textile factories, achieving a degree of economic independence and sharing companionship during the long walks to work.
This revelation deeply affected the artist. In response, he decided to honor that memory by discreetly incorporating thread into his works. What began as a symbolic gesture became the axis of a new creative stage. For four years, he silently researched how to secure threads on canvas, experimenting with materials, tensions, and compositions. From this exploration came FIL BLAU (2014), a collection named after the first blue thread that came into his hands. A year later, FIL BLAU 2 confirmed that “painting with threads” was no longer a technique: it was language, identity, root.
In 2016, the Can Prunera Museum invited him to present his work as a tribute to Sóller’s industrial past. That same year, his work gained international visibility through his representative, Mr. Levy, reaching Belgium, Dubai, India, and South Africa. Some pieces became part of the private collection of the Jumeirah hotel group.
His technique was consolidated. Threads stretched across surfaces, fixed with resins, natural pigments, and marble dust, created compositions that played with light, shadow, and texture. In 2017, he presented QUERMÉS at ABA ART LAB, a collection that explored the symbolism of the red thread and its relationship with the ancestral textile dye extracted from the kermes insect. It was an ode to craftsmanship, to forgotten techniques, and to the historical richness of the island’s materials.
In 2021, Garau refined his visual language and embraced an expressive minimalism. He began working on black or white canvases, where thread, intertwined in free gestures, became the sole visual element. Geometry, precise lines, and a restrained yet intentional use of color marked this stage, in which the artist explored a clean and serene abstraction that invites contemplation. That same year, he created EMBULLS, a series of immersive installations where original thread spools from Mallorca’s industrial past expanded throughout the exhibition space, evoking sensations of contained chaos, memory, and belonging. Weaving, in this context, is remembering. It is resisting. It is inhabiting thread as a symbolic and emotional territory.
Garau’s creative universe also includes collections such as CONTRASTE ENTRELAZADO, inspired by Mallorcan folklore and traditional attire—with particular attention to the cotton skirts of the pagesas—and COLORES DEL MEDITERRÁNEO, where he evokes serene and profound seascapes, as an emotional tribute to the landscape that saw him grow. His work presents itself as a meditation on space, light, and form. Each thread is placed with intention; nothing is superfluous. His pieces convey a sense of peace and serenity to those who stop to contemplate them. Through them, Garau invites us to quiet the noise, to focus on the essential, and to find beauty in simplicity and stillness.
From 2014 to today, Toni Garau has consolidated a singular technique—mature and in constant search. His work has been exhibited in spaces such as Leonhard’s Gallery (Antwerp), Pigment Gallery (Barcelona), Gallery Red (Mallorca), and The K Art Signatures (Brussels), among others.
Garau transforms the exhibition space into a sensory and symbolic experience. His interest in history, local identity, and the poetics of textiles turns each piece into a bridge between past and present. In his work, thread does not merely bind: it also narrates, evokes, and repairs.