Tag Archives: poema objeto

Art Brussels 2023

Art Brussels 2023 | Galeria Joan Prats,

Booth 5A 26 with NOGUERASBLANCHARD

 

Rediscovery programme, a presentation of works by

JOAN BROSSA

PEREJAUME

 

Art Brussels preview:  ENG    FR

 

Our booth on Artsy

 

 

Joan Prats and Nogueras Blanchard’s proposal for Art Brussels 2023 introduces a dialogue between the work of Joan Brossa (Barcelona, 1919 – 1998) and Perejaume (Sant Pol de Mar, 1957). In 1975, Perejaume was fascinated by the first monographic study of Brossa’s poetical work. The interest was mutual, since Brossa was astonished by the combination of surrealism and romanticism depicted in Perejaume’s early work. Being artists of different generations, Brossa and Perejaume crossed paths in their unique approach to poetry through objects, gestures and visual representations.

 

For Art Brussels we present a selection of historical works – from 1980 to 1990 – a key moment for both Brossa and Perejaume. During this period, Brossa mainly produced “object-poems”; artworks that combine everyday life objects that he decontextualizes from their original function to expand their critical nature. Likewise, Perejaume moved from “painting-painting” to “depainting”. Like Brossa, Perejaume used to manipulate his materials and symbols in a way that does not always indicate a specific point of view but rather approaches the state of the image through inversions of meaning.

 

These works by Brossa and Perejaume want to enhance the affinity between their ways of seeing poetry and influence. For Perejaume, painting is an exercise of occultation, of veiling with a succession of layers. Metamorfosador attends to this logic by pointing out the origin. By covering the stretcher with a canvas, Perejaume reveals the pictorial gesture of the background. The potential transformation of objects and their concealment are also reflected in Brossa’s object-poems. Eclipsi or Puzzle cease to be objects to become poetic artifacts that are born as an ironic game that generates estrangement in the viewer. Likewise, Projeccions, by Perejaume, and Sense paisatge, by Brossa, hide, show and superimpose points of view, images and objects to rebel against rigid meanings. 

 

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).

 

Barcelona, 1919-1998

 

Joan Brossa, poet, playwright and artist, was one of the founders of the magazine “Dau Al Set”, together with Ponç, Cuixart, Arnau Puig, Tàpies and Tharrats, and author of an interdisciplinary work, characterized by experimentation with language and use of all kinds of techniques and styles. In 1960 he participated, invited by Joan Miró, in the exhibition Poètes, peintres, sculpteurs in the Galerie Maeght in Paris, at the same time that he began to collaborate with Miró and Tàpies and, later, with artists such as Alfons Borrell, Chillida, José Niebla, Perejaume, among others. In the international scene, he participated in important exhibitions such as the São Paulo (1994) and Venice (1997) biennials. Among the individual exhibitions stand out those made in the Musée d’Art Moderne de Céret and the Musée de Collioure (1990); at the Center International de Poésie de Marseille; in the Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum, Madrid (1991); in the Kunstmuseum Malmö, Sweden (1993); at the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró in Palma de Mallorca (1994); at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey and at the Carrillo Gil Museum of Art in Mexico; in the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel and in the Städtische Galerie in Göppingen, Germany (1998), among others. After his death, in 2001 the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona dedicated him an important anthological exhibition and in 2017 MACBA presents the Poesia Brossa exhibition, a review of the artist’s work through books, visual searches, theater, cinema, music, action arts, etc.