JOAN PONÇ BONET (Barcelona, 1927 - Saint-Paul, France, 1984).
"Pyrenean Nocturne", 1980-83.
Oil on canvas.
Titled and dated on the back.
With the label of the Galeria Dau al Set on the back (with faults).
This work was in the exhibition held at the Galeria Dau al Set entitled "Joan Ponç Precursor 1946-47-48" between October and November 1983, in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the gallery.
Measurements: 89 x 147 cm; 92.5 x 150 cm (frame).
In this canvas, which belongs to Joan Ponç's last creative period (1980s), the personal symbolism with which the singular artist gave birth, from the early 1940s, to a world of his own inhabited by phantasmagorical visions and imaginary beings of a visual impact as unique as it is disturbing, is fully developed. After a long stay in Brazil, the decade of the 1980s was marked by growing vision problems, which, far from intimidating him, brought syncretism and intensity to his work, addressing in it his rebelliousness and obsessive fear of illness and death. In this case, and with that particular style of his, which is halfway between a certain primitivism and the second pictorial avant-garde, Ponç offers us a nocturnal scenography in which he constructs an apotheosic and almost apocalyptic vision of his universe, full of diabolical, tortured and premonitory beings through which Ponç explored the darkest areas of the human being, which, as in this case, are intimately related to his situation, which is ever closer to death.
A painter and draughtsman, he trained in Barcelona, in the studio of Ramón Rogent and at the Academy of Plastic Arts with Ãngel López-Obrero. He held his first individual exhibition in 1946, at the Galería Arte in Bilbao, which marked his definitive consolidation on the national art scene. In 1948, together with Tharrats, Puig, Cuixart, Tàpies and Brossa, among others, he founded the avant-garde group Dau al Set. Selected by Eugenio D'Ors, he took part in the Salón de los Once in Madrid in 1951 and 1952. In 1952 he took part in the Hispano-American Biennial, and the following year he spent some time in Paris, where he met Joan Miró and managed to exhibit at the Musée de la Villa. On the latter's recommendation, Ponç gained access to Brazilian artistic circles, settling in São Paulo from 1953 to 1962. In 1954, the year Dau al Set disbanded, he held an exhibition at the city's Museum of Modern Art. In 1955 he founded the Taüll group with Marc Aleu, Modest Cuixart, Jaume Guinovart, Jaume Muxart, Mercadé, Tàpies and Tharrats. After returning to Catalonia due to illness, as a fully established artist he shows his work in New York, Rio de Janeiro, Bonn, Paris, Frankfurt, Geneva, Antibes and various Spanish cities. In 1965 he won the International Grand Prize for Drawing at the São Paulo Biennial. Ponç's paintings present phantasmagoric images that are both painful and tortured, in which the subconscious is the protagonist. For the painter, art is nothing more than an introduction to the mystery and secrets of the spirit. More of a draughtsman than a painter, his work is extremely detailed and meticulous. Ponç's production can be divided into six periods: the Dau al Set period (1947), the Brazilian period (1958), the metaphysical-geometric period (1969), the period of the metaphysical characters (1970), the acupainting period (1971) and a final period of synthesis (1972).