José Pérez Ocaña

JOSE PEREZ OCAÑA (Cantillana, 1947-Sevilla, 1983).
Mask "El Mussol, nickname of Ventura Ametller".
Painted papier mache.
Signed on the hat. Titled.
Presents some lack of polychrome and slight breakage on one side.
Measurements: 34 x 23 x 13 cm.

The "Mussol" (the Owl) was the nickname of Ventura Ametller (1933-2008), a Catalan writer, poet and playwright, close friend and important figure in the life of the anarchist and transgressor artist José Pérez Ocaña. He witnessed and often participated in Ocaña's performances and bohemian life in Barcelona during the years of the Transition.

His artistic career began in Barcelona, where he moved in 1971, in the midst of Franco's repression. He studied at the Art School of Narciso Galiat. Protagonist of the cultural revolution of the spirit of 75 in Barcelona, which transformed Las Ramblas into a space of freedom, Ocaña participates, together with the also Andalusian Camilo and Nazario, of the bohemian, provocative and marginal world of that great multicultural city. A devoted follower of Marc Chagall's painting, Ocaña practiced an artistic attitude close to Dadaism, with his own personality made art. In 1977, Ventura Pons vindicates his figure in the film 'Ocaña, retrato intermitente' (Ocaña, intermittent portrait) and holds his first major exhibition at the Mec Mec gallery, which brings him international recognition and allows him to travel around Europe and America to discover new trends, which he incorporates into his own creativity, based on the icons that are part of the Andalusian popular mythology. In 1978 he exhibited at the Quatre Gats Gallery in Palma de Mallorca, and created a mural for the Bodega Bohemia in Barcelona. Considered a multifaceted and transgressive artist, precursor of the performance, he is the model that Pedro Almodóvar would take in his first productions of the character of Kike Turmix and the reference of fanzines of the time, such as STAR. In this album of drawings, resolved with loose and spontaneous strokes, he immortalizes the people in his circle of life. His painting, expressionist and naïff, was inextricable from his way of living and thinking, so these drawings become a kind of visual diary.