|
|
Joan Ponç is considered to be one of the big representatives of current surrealistism in Spain and also one of the most emphasised Catalan artists after the Spanish Civil war. At the end of the forties, he and a new generation of artists, philosophers and poets, re-tackled the artistic activity in Catalonia. His look always overturned on the interior of the existence of the human being and the mysterious search of the relation between the beings and the things, has turned Ponç into one of the most original and fascinating artists. Joan Ponç was a bad student who at once was interested in drawing and painting. He began his lesson with the painter Ramón Rogent and in the Academy of Applied Arts of Barcelona. His constant interest for the magic led him to being interested in the surrealism and his relation with the world of the psychoanalysis of Freud.
He established friendships with poets as
JV Foix and
Joan Brossa, with whom he shared artistic vision. In this first stage of the work of Ponç offers visions of a primitive schematicism; in which the interior and exterior worlds are mixed and the beings that inhabit them; anthropomorphic and vegetable figures fill chaotically the composition.
In 1947, at the age of twenty, he associated himself with the La Campana of Sant Gervasi and also the same year took part together with Foix, Brossa and
Arnau Puig in the creation of the magazine Algol, of which only a number appeared, but which served as place of meeting of a new generation of creators.
One year later, he founded the magazine and the group
Dau al Set together with the painters
Modest Cuixart,
Antoni Tàpies and
Joan Josep Tharrats, writers
Joan Brossa y
Arnau Puig, and the critic JE Cirlot. The activity of the group marked in Catalonia a stage of cultural renewal and applied arts rested on the most immediate artistic past, truncated by the Civil War: the surrealism and dadaism of André Breton and, especially, of
Joan Miró. In this stage the surrealistic aesthetics of Ponç became strong in the shape of elements of the world of the imagination and of the sleep in which the subconscious outcropped. The human figure acquired major entity and developed in amazing and unreal sceneries becoming infested with monsters, with ghosts, but with more recognisable and daily elements. The composition, less chaotic, kept the harmful delight and the infernal perception so typical. According to Ponç: "My work has always revolved concerning the magical and, undoubtedly, magic was the essence of
Dau al Set ".
In 1949 Ponç exhibited in the Laietanas Galleries stimulated by Magpie Nuño and JE Cirlot and, the same year, h was invited by
Eugeni D'Ors to participate in the Salón de los Once, together with Miró, Dalí and García Towers. Although the public and the critique received his work with incomprehension, Ponç decided to continue his artistic trajectory in his magic-dream line.
In 1953 he travelled to Paris and later to Brazil, where he remained ten years. His trip to Brazil was, to a great extent, due to the need to move away from a modernity that was disturbing him and to the differences that started outcropping in the bosom of the group
Dau al Set, of which every time he was feeling more remote. This way he says it That Ponç: "My partners feel a major attraction, each time more and more, for the latest mainstreams of painting, news from which they come to us from Paris. I feel, on the other hand, more and more attracted to the Quatrocento italiano".
He achieved individual exhibitions in the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo and lived being employed intensely at an ambience that was propitious due to the love for the magical that was prevailing and that he considered it to be helping him overcome the self-critical tendencies that were doing so much evil to him. Also in São Paulo he created L'Espai, a school dedicated to the investigation of visual arts. Of the stay in Brazil, the serial production is characteristic of a major affirmation of drawing and new situations of crisis that reflected in his work. The series Suite heads, stylized portraits and culmination of the frightfulness, and Suite birds, were making his new obsession clear for the solitude and the monochrome.
In 1962 Ponç returned to Barcelona, due to health problems, moving away from painting and demonstrated many resistances to show his work. Finally, and before the insistence of Joan Perucho, a retrospective was organised in the René Métras Gallery, which obtained a big success both from the critique and of public. Restoring the interior balance, the drawings of Ponç became meticulous and precise, eliminating the horror vacui, and the skill pointillism arose. Nevertheless, soon, his new series, Neurasténi, of cinematic influence, was evidence of a new crisis.
In 1965 he received the Grand Prize of Drawing in the VIIIth Biennial of São Paulo for his series of Suite birds. In the middle of an intense creative activity, he settled, one year later, in Cadaqués, where he felt at home, both with the people of the village, and with the intellectuals that he was meeting, for example, Marcel Duchamp.
From 1967 until 1970 he entered a metaphysical - geometric stage in which the oil and the drawing constructed elementary forms that were contrasting to his interior baroque-like nature and where the sensation of gap kept on being domineering.
In 1971 he settled in the Roca de Palença where he kept on working intensely in spite of his increasing health problems.
In 1983 an important retrospective of his work was achieve in Barcelona, and one year later he died in Saint Paul of Vence (France), the place where he was going living a while back, till his last moments.
Ponç maintained until the end of his life the oneiric universe that he had created respectfully of imaginary provided of organic and inorganic elements.
Yurka Griemsmann Peidro.