Joan Ponç

JOAN PONÇ BONET (Barcelona, 1927 - Saint-Paul, France, 1984).
Untitled, 1973.
Etching, copy 39/75.
Signed, dated and justified by hand.
Measurements: 49 x 63 cm (print); 70 x 82 cm (paper).
Painter and draftsman, he was formed in Barcelona, in the workshop of Ramón Rogent and in the Academy of Plastic Arts with Ángel López-Obrero. After dedicating himself to painting and drawing in anonymity, he held his first individual exhibition in 1946, at the Art Gallery of Bilbao, which was to be his definitive consolidation within the national artistic panorama. In 1948 he founded, together with Tharrats, Puig, Cuixart, Tàpies and Brossa among others, the avant-garde group Dau al Set. Selected by Eugenio D'Ors, he participated 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 was able 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 of the dissolution of Dau al Set, he held an exhibition at the city's Museum of Modern Art, with such success that the organization acquired all of the works. In Brazil he visited the equatorial jungles, where he was impressed by the fauna, especially insects, which he incorporated into his imagery. 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 an illness, as a fully consecrated artist, he shows his work in New York, Rio de Janeiro, Bonn, Paris, Frankfurt, Geneva, Antibes and several Spanish cities. In 1965 he won the International Drawing Grand Prize at the São Paulo Biennial. Ponç's paintings present phantasmagoric images that are at the same time 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 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 metaphysical characters period (1970), the acupainting period (1971) and a final period of synthesis (1972). In his work Ponç manifests himself as a sorcerer artist, who conceives art as magic, as an extraordinary power, a spell, something supernatural. But the great Catalan master was not only that; his art is also the exploration of the negative, the attraction to the perverse and the diabolical, a reflection of a universe plagued by monstrous and evil beings, satanic and perfidious spirits, a reflection of the fascination that his author felt for evil.