Tag Archives: joan ponç

the magic carpet

Documentary film: ‘The magic carpet. Voices to remember Joan de Muga’

 

The exhibition ‘The Magic Carpet. For Joan de Muga’ is a tribute to Joan de Muga, founder and director of Joan Prats Gallery since 1976, when it opened, until 2020. The exhibition will bring together the work of artists who have been part of the gallery since the beginning to the present, together with photographs, letters, videos and documentation, to explain the history of the gallery and also Ediciones Polígrafa and other projects by Joan de Muga such as Fundació Espai Poblenou.

 

We will show works by Juan Araujo, Francis Bacon, Alfons Borrell, Joan Brossa, Cabrita, Alexander Calder, Anthony Caro, Chillida, Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Victoria Civera, Hannah Collins, Helen Frankenthaler, Luis Gordillo, Guinovart, Hernández Pijuan, Wifredo Lam, Louise Lawler, Miralda, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Muntadas, Pablo Palazuelo, Perejaume, Joan Ponç, Fernando Prats, Ràfols Casamada, Caio Reisewitz, Julião Sarmento, George Segal, José María Sicilia, Antoni Tàpies, Juan Uslé, Eulàlia Valldosera, Sue Williams

 

The title of the exhibition is inspired by a drawing by Joan Ponç dedicated to Joan de Muga, in which he portrayed him on a flying carpet. This sketch refers to his enterprising and visionary character, his passion for traveling and for imagining new projects.

 

We are organizing the exhibition with the complicity of Carles Guerra, who will write the text of the publication that we will publish later.

vint rostres

Vint rostres i tres multituds.

 

En tres actes. Fundació Suñol.

 

30.09.2021 – 08.04.2022

 

 

 

En tres actes és un tríptic expositiu comissariat en col·laboració amb Valentín Roma acompanyat d’un conjunt de programes públics que pretén mostrar quines són les línies argumentals de la Col·lecció Suñol Soler i amb quins horitzons artístics i històrics va ser creada.

 

 

El tercer i últim acte, Vint rostres i tres multituds, s’endinsa en el gran motiu iconogràfic de l’art, l’element que qüestiona les cronologies i porta fins al present la versemblança de tots els passats: el rostre humà.

 

La cara és memòria i és, així mateix, literatura d’allò viscut. S’hi escriu l’experiència i s’hi intueix el futur. Una faç que mira amb inquietud reclama que la desxifrem. Una cara que oculta la seva fisonomia sembla administrar quines són les seves certeses.

 

La Col·lecció Suñol Soler té rostres petrificats i façs diluïdes, cares reconeixibles i semblants en fuga. Els vint rostres seleccionats tenen el seu contrapunt en tres multituds que els observen i els acullen. Al costat de la soledat de la cara buscant causes per ser, hi trobem la multitud assajant raons on reconèixer-se.

 

Artistes: Rosa Amorós, Eduardo Arroyo, Richard Avedon, Roman Buxbaum, Pep Duran, Fred Forest, Pablo Gargallo, Juan Genovés,  Juli González, Luis Gordillo, José P. Jardiel, Ouka Leele, Robert Llimós, Robert Mapplethorpe, Antoni Miralda, Inge Morath, Antoni Muntadas, Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Pablo Picasso, Joan Ponç, Darío Villalba, Andy Warhol, Zush/Evru.

 

 

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Estar a la lluna

FONTETA – Bombon · Joan Prats · NoguerasBlanchard

Capítol II: Estar a la lluna (Head in the clouds)

 

Opening: 7th of August, 12am-9pm

Exhibition until 26th of September

c/ Empordà, 10, Fonteta, Girona

 

August: Monday to Sunday, 5-9pm

September: Friday to Sunday, 5-9pm

or by appointment: (+34) 644 524 969

 

 

We’re delighted to present the second chapter of the joint project by Bombon, Galeria Joan Prats and NoguerasBlanchard in Fonteta, a small village in the Emporda region.

 

The exhibition, conceived in two chapters (the first opening June 19th and the second August 7th) brings together artists from three different generations. The proposal begins with a concept from the Emporda Parar la fresca (to take in fresh air) described by Josep Pla in the book “Las Horas”.

 

 

Text by Gabriel Ventura

 

 

“Perhaps because for so many centuries it has been out of reach, it has awakened the most fantastical dreams, those which are most passionate and hidden. Its charm will always be on behalf of the nighttime, of the occult and intuition, of secrecy and excess. The moon -which dilates and dwarfs cat’s eyes, makes tides rise and fall, and inflates and deflates frogs continues to fascinate us with the same fervour of ancient times, even though we have already stepped upon it gingerly, and now some enlightened entrepreneurs plan to build hotels with galactic views. But let’s not fool ourselves: the colonising eagerness of Jeff Bezos and company will not be able to bring closer or make more comprehensible the mysteries of the White Hare or the Spider Woman.

 

Eternally distant, the moon has been worshiped by witches and vampires, by poets and fortune-tellers. As much as science tries to conquer it, the lunar mercurial light projects us towards remote and inscrutable futures, and invites us to reflect on the shadows and myths of the human condition. Throughout history we have linked it to fertility and the unconscious, to death and resurrection, to the repetition of life’s cycles. The first inscribed annotations on artefacts and tools from the Palaeolithic era consist of lunar records. In fact, is very likely that before the advent of agriculture, societies were organised according to a lunar temporal cycle, as demonstrated by Alexander Marshack’s research in The Roots of Civilization.

 

Unlike the sun, the omnipotent and constant star, the moon goes through phases; it waxes and wanes, dwindles, bends, and transforms. For this reason, there has been a historical tendency to represent what is immutable with the sun (God), and that which is changing and material with the moon (for example, Plato’s sublunar and mortal kingdom, the land of doubt and shadows). Inevitably, for millennia, human species has found its counterpart in the drama of the moon: being born, growing up, reproducing (the belly of the full moon), and dying. If the solar syntax divides and ranks –W.B. Yeats accused the sun of offering “complex and contrived” truths– the lunar syntax mixes and confuses the forms by being evasive, emotional, fluid. Symbolically, the moon evokes the imaginative, contingent, and ambiguous world of existence, which contrasts against absolute solar truths shaping an ideal world of being. It is impossible to look directly at the sun, it is impossible to enter into a dialogue with its dazzling presence. The moon, on the other hand, illuminates paths from the brinks of the sky and, in the words of Lorca, shamelessly shows its “one hundred identical faces”. Illusion, delirium, chimera, madness, chaos, dispersion (estar a la lluna 1): the attributes of the queen of the night suggest the transgression of daytime norms.

 

Lilacs and electric blues, striking yellows and raging reds, fluorescent greens that shoot up from the dark, like a scream piercing the conscience. The colours of the night sharpen the nerves as well as the eye; they make us untrusting, and we sense the intermittent heartbeat of danger.

 

A tremor runs down our backs: is it real, what we have seen? Can we believe in the images and words that appear under Selene’s cold light? Perhaps, deep down, being on the moon is one of the most fruitful and perplexing ways to be on Earth -not taking anything for granted, continuing to be suspicious, and looking up at the unfathomable secrets of the universe.

 

Gabriel Ventura

 

 

* Capítol I: Parar la fresca (To take in fresh air)

DIJOUS 25 DE GENER 19H

Postil·la a una amistat equivocada (Lorca-Dalí, Brossa-Ponç). Xerrada a càrrec d’ARNAU PUIG

 

DIMARTS 30 DE GENER 19H

Presentació del llibre d’Edicions Poncianes: Quadern de correspondències de Joan Ponç (Pilar Parcerisas ed.)

Amb la participació de JORDI CARULLA-RUIZ,  PILAR PARCERISAS, VICENÇ ALTAIÓ, EDUARD SEPÚLVEDA I GLÒRIA BORDONS

Joan Ponç

We are pleased to present the exhibition dedicated to Joan Ponç and Joan Brossa, to be opened on Thursday, November 30rd, and where we will show works by two of the most significant artists in the recovery of avant-garde art in our country after the civil war, united by a creative and personal affinity from the late 40s to the early 50s and also linked to the history of Galeria Joan Prats, where they both would exhibit on several occasions.

 

In 1982, Joan Brossa showed for the first time in his exhibition at Galeria Joan Prats his object and visual poems, poems that he was making since 1954 and that were by then practically unknown by the public. Later, they would be shown in other exhibitions at the gallery in Barcelona (1989, 1995, 1997) and in New York (1989), and at the Basel Fair (1989). On the other hand, Joan Ponç began his collaboration with Galeria Joan Prats in 1978, with the exhibition Fons de l’ésser. He also exhibited in 1983, Nocturns, in 1987 with drawings from Pre-Dau Al Set period, in 1994 and 1996 with drawings from Suite Geomètrica and in 1980 at the FIAC art fair in Paris.

 

As Arnau Puig says in the text written for this exhibition, “A temperament and character of the dimensions of Brossa was almost destined to come across someone like Joan Ponç, who came down from the clouds”. This taste for magic, divination and the occult would be one of the points of union between the two artists, who met in 1946. That year they would publish together with Arnau Puig and Enric Tormo the only issue of the magazine “Algol”, which wanted to be a revulsive in front of immobilism and the loss of idealism of their contemporaries. They proposed a renewal of the look that is also visible in the monotypes that Ponç made to accompany the issues of the magazine and that moves away from the predominant naturalist figuration in Spanish art of the time.

 

In addition to this interest in new artistic forms, the works by Brossa and Ponç coincided thematically in a concern and criticism of society, along with an interest in popular culture, theatre and magic that we already pointed out. That’s why, in those years, collaborations between the two took place: the unpublished book Parafaragaramus (1948), two issues of the magazine “Dau Al Set” (January, 1949 and an unpublished one), the book Em va fer Joan Brossa (1951), where a portrait of Joan Brossa by Joan Ponç appears, considered the most direct and sincere portrait the poet has ever had. The Brossa-Ponç relationship was also reflected in the poems by Brossa alluding to Ponç and in several Ponç drawings: the Dibuixos podrits (1947) and the Metamorfosis (1947), the Joan Brossa-Joan Ponç suite (1947), the cover of the book Dragolí by Brossa (1950), or the gouache Brossa, Brossa (1950), that we show in this exhibition.

 

Brossa and Ponç were at the time two standard bearers of the aesthetic renovation, following the steps of J.V. Foix and Joan Miró. Brossa, who had met Miró in 1941 through the hat maker and patron Joan Prats, at J.V. Foix’s home, would introduce them Joan Ponç. “Dau Al Set” would help to restore bridges with the avant-garde of ADLAN, promoted by Joan Prats and Joaquim Gomis, and GATCPAC.

 

After this period of affinity and creativity, in 1953 Joan Ponç went to Brazil, and each artist continued his own journey. On his return to Catalonia, in 1962, Brossa was already very far from magic surrealism and was moving by an antipoetry linked to reality while doing plastic experiments of what would be his visual poetry. Their bond would be diluted. For Brossa, Ponç would always be linked to “Dau Al Set”.

 

This exhibition aims to show the trajectories of the two artists: a first part, with works from the period “Dau Al Set”, the moment of greatest affinity between Joan Brossa and Joan Ponç, and a second part of the exhibition, with later works, that allow to see their evolutions in the plastic field, and that they are reflected in the same way as in the Joan Brossa-Joan Ponç suite (1947).

 

Diàbolo

La Pedrera, Barcelona

6.10.2017 – 4.2.2018

 

L’exposició, comissariada per la historiadora i crítica d’art Pilar Parcerisa, presenta una nova interpretació antològica de l’obra i la figura del pintor Joan Ponç, des dels seus inicis a mitjan anys 40 i l’època del grup Dau al Set, fins a les darreres obres de mitjan anys 80. Amb el títol de «Diàbolo», vol fer referència al sentit lúdic de Joan Ponç, amb l’ambivalència que el nom d’aquest joc malabar xinès té amb el del diable.

 

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  Barcelona, 1927 – Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 1984

 

Joan Ponç was a primordial painter within the avant-garde scene during the Spanish post-war period. Founder of the magazine “Dau Al Set”, together with Brossa, Cuixart, Arnau Puig, Tàpies and Tharrats, he would remain faithful to the aesthetic principles of the group throughout his long career. After a brief stay in Paris, he lived in Brazil, where he created the group L’Esplai and where he exhibited at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (1954 and 1956). In 1964 he returned to Catalonia, the same year that René Metras Gallery in Barcelona organized a retrospective exhibition. In 1972 the monograph Universo y magia de Joan Ponç de Mordechai Omer was published and in 1978 the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris dedicated him an important solo exhibition. His work has been exhibited in important museums and art centers such as Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid; Artium in Vitoria-Gasteiz; Bonner Kunstverein in Bonn; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico; The National Museum of Art of Romania Bucharest; Fondation Maeght de Saint-Paul-de-Vence, among others. In 2017, Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera in Barcelona presents the exhibition Diàbolo, a new anthological interpretation of the work and the figure of the painter, from the forties to the eighties.