Jordi Fornies

Artist + Musician

JORDI FORNIÉS: HELA NOKTO

Uniquely multifaceted musician, composer, and visual artist Jordi Forniés paints expressive portraits with sound in his new collection of nocturnes for piano solo and piano and strings.

Jordi Forniés, a creative visionary hailing from Spain and based in Singapore, is fluent in multiple professional disciplines, including music, composition, painting, sculpture, chemistry, marketing, and international business development. Ever-evolving and driven by insatiable curiosity, Forniés has built an extraordinary body of work by exploring and combining these worlds to tell multidimensional stories with a voice all his own.

As an artist, Forniés desires to speak clearly and directly with audiences; now, in a burst of creative energy, and after finishing a Masters in Fine Arts in Music Composition and Orchestration, the longtime pianist has discovered a powerful new way of doing so: through writing music. In his upcoming album Hela Nokto, released for Decca Records US, Forniés infuses his many influences into a suite of modern, expressive nocturnes for piano and piano and cello ensembles. Blending classical structure and emotional immediacy, the collection unfolds in bold, lyrical brushstrokes across ethereal landscapes. Whether a delicate waltz or a poignant conversation between strings, Hela Nokto is the product of a Renaissance man in renaissance as he sculpts a singular approach to contemporary classical music.

The title Hela Nokto means “Bright Night” in Esperanto, a universal language created to be understood and spoken by everyone, and evokes Forniés’s desire to cross borders and barriers. “Bright Night” also illuminates the intimate, quiet hours of nighttime, a setting that is crucial to Forniés’s artistic process. He says that at these moments, “I feel I’m someone else, in a sense.” Forniés’s deepest artistic roots are music and painting, and at night they seem to weave together in expansive creative possibilities. “I listen to a lot of music when I am painting, sometimes create melodies. I have to compose at night.” The same goes for the listening experience: “You have to listen to it at night…you will feel the music is different.” His music exudes a soft, silvery quality, while at the same time being very much awake.

Music and visual art have together formed the core of Forniés’s creative practice and identity since his earliest years. He grew up in the small city of Huesca, Spain as the youngest of seven children, and from early on felt different from everyone around him. His artistic practices brought a deep sense of fulfillment and achievement. “I was painting, I was creating, I was imagining different worlds. I wanted to be the kid that brings amazing things,” Forniés said. The first in his family to attend college, from age seven he trained at the Conservatorio Profesional de Musica de Vila-seca outside Barcelona, immersing himself in rigorous studies for three hours every day after primary school. He gained technical skills, sang in choir, performed, traveled to Paris, and auditioned at competitions. A devoted student, Forniés was undeterred by the lack of a piano at his home; when away from school, he practiced fingerings on a piece of wood painted with keys. Along the way, he was always painting, having taught himself how after being intrigued by a canvas hanging in his home.

Forniés loves to learn. With his early-established diligence, after high school Forniés embarked on an ambitious educational journey across multiple leading universities and academic fields. First, he studied chemistry, ultimately earning a PhD while working at and publishing scholarship for the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Eventually, he pivoted into industry, creating statistical models for major multinational corporations across Europe before earning a Master’s in Marketing and Communication Management from Barcelona’s Open University.

While living in Dublin, Forniés flourished as a self-taught painter alongside his prodigious career in science and business. (Of his ability to work so intently at art during this period, he says, “The weather in Ireland is not great. Everybody knows.”) Demand for his artwork surged and he decided to pursue his first formal training in visual arts: a Master of Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London/Singapore’s LASALLE College of the Arts, and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Sydney.

Forniés’s recognition as a visual artist now spans the globe. His work has been featured in over 50 solo exhibitions in 10 countries, including in galleries such as Castell de Vila-seca in Tarragona, Spain, the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai, La Cité Du Temps’ Nicolas G. Hayek Center in Tokyo, and The Institute of Contemporary Arts in Singapore, and is held in public collections such as the Spanish National Historical Heritage Collection, the Office of Public Works of Ireland, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Tarragona in Spain, and Ireland’s Trinity College, as well as those of corporations including Meta Inc, Swatch, KPMG, and Deloitte.

Forniés brings the intellectual rigor of his scientific background to all of his artistry. Of his process, he says, “as an artist I am focused on research…I have a question. I do research. Then exploration. And then I bring my conclusion, as if I was writing a thesis.” He also draws on a profound knowledge of materials and resultant sense of experimentation: “My experience as a chemist allows me to work with emotions, how to work with different materials that other people may not be using, just because maybe they don't think about them.” As a painter he is known for his innovative use of texture and materials, such as extruding plastic, or injecting ink with magnetic liquid so it moves without the touch of a brush.

In 2017, Forniés posed an inquiry that would yet again transform his career. He wanted to explore form as it relates to sound and visual art: how can sound express visual art through form, and vice versa? How does each rely on our experience of time? His project Sonance: Sound as Body, Sound as Architecture, exhibited as a winner of the 2016 Chan-Davies Art Prize in Singapore, probed the question through a series of paintings and bronze sculptures. Some resembled trumpets, and others bells with humanlike, wide-open mouths. With their varied shapes and sizes, they could be struck or “played” to sound different notes, and in 2019 Forniés gave a performance to this effect at the Sydney College of Arts.

To Forniés, however, the musical component of Sonance only raised more questions. It was easy enough to use the physicality of art to suggest sound—for instance, evoking music through the instrument-like shapes of the bronzes. But how can sound physically generate visual art? The idea perplexed Forniés, and he experimented with channeling frequency and soundwaves–the spatial element of sound–into his materials, changing their colors and “tones.” As he delved deeper and deeper into the nature of sound and its power to evoke an infinite number of emotional responses with just a handful of notes, he felt called for the first time to compose music.