Reus, July 9, 2026. The facilities of the NEWART Centre have welcomed this Thursday the delivery act of ESGUARD, the piece created by the artist Oriol Parés within the framework of the Reddis Award - NAF - Eufònic, an initiative aimed at boosting the production and artistic research at the confluence between art, science and technology.
The grant, endowed with 6,000 euros and funded entirely by the Reddis Private Foundation, has allowed the production of the work, which becomes part of the Foundation's heritage and will be preserved and guarded by the NEWART Foundation.
The call is part of the Prize-Contemporary Art Grant of the Reddis Private Foundation, a biannual initiative that supports artists who research new contemporary languages. Throughout its editions, it has promoted projects related to territory, memory, social reality and digital art.
The president of the Reddis Private Foundation, Lluís Colomés, said that "with this call, the Reddis Private Foundation reinforces its commitment to artists, aware of the need to have time, resources and support to develop processes of creation and research, and reaffirms the will to promote projects that contribute to a critical and mature look at the contemporary world."
Andreu Rodríguez, president of NEWART Centre, stressed that “this grant demonstrates the importance of building alliances between institutions to give artists the tools they need to research and experiment with new languages”. The grant also represents an important step in developing NEWART Centre’s new production and research workshop, a space designed to promote the creation of technological artworks and provide artists with the infrastructure and technical support needed to develop projects involving new technologies.
The ESGUARD project was chosen by the jury in December 2025 among 28 proposals submitted from all over Catalonia, a participation that highlights the good moment that the Catalan ecosystem lives in the field of art, science and technology.
Trained in classical music (saxophone), experimental music and visual arts, Oriol Parés develops an artistic practice focused on the architecture of sound, matter and information, exploring how computational languages can generate new ways of experiencing time, the body and presence. He is currently a PhD student in Contemporary Art, within the “Art, meaning and culture” research team at the University of the Basque Country, EHU, in Bilbao (EUS).
