Joan-Pere Viladecans

JOAN PERE VILADECANS (Barcelona, 1948).
"Salveu-me la mirada".
Bibliophile edition with the work of Joan-Pere Viladecans.
Limited and numbered edition that brings together the poetry of Miquel Martí i Pol with the artistic creation of Joan-Pere Viladecans. The extensive selection, gathered in 5 folders, reviews the career of the poet from Roda de Ter through his most significant poems, as well as his vital and human trajectory, especially marked by his social origin, his immediate environment and the illness that conditioned his life since 1970.
This anthology, presented by Àlex Broch, suggested Joan-Pere Viladecans 17 works that are reproduced in triptych format, an original engraving and 6 covers for each of the folders.
Numbered and certified copy.
Screen-printed sycamore wood case, 55 × 43 cm.
Giclée reproduction of the original engraving by Joan-Pere Viladecans created for the work, supervised by the artist, signed, hand numbered and framed.
The covers of each of the folders were also created especially for this edition.
A self-taught artist, he exhibited for the first time in 1967 at the Cercle de Sant Lluc. After an outstanding start, he exhibited again in Barcelona in 1969, at Sala Gaspar, and that same year in Toronto. His triple exhibition in Barcelona in 1980 consolidated him, in certain circles, as a young alternative to the predominance of the historical Catalan avant-garde. He also presented his work in South Africa, Cologne, Mexico, Palma, New York, Ibiza, Paris, Girona, Alicante, Madrid, Brussels, London and Luxembourg.
Among his subsequent exhibitions were those at the Seville Expo (1992), Manresa (1998), Cologne (2001) and Berlin (2003). He also organized his production in series or cycles, among which stand out Paintings (1980-82), Figure and background (1986), A natural history (1998), 365 days (1999-2000), Large format (2004-06), Symptoms and diseases (2006), Heritage and memory (2007) and Fauna and flora (2008).
An early admirer of Antoni Tàpies, he developed his own language that combines traces, collage of real elements and precise signs in search of a plastic lyricism. He also worked with environnements, poster design and book and record cover design. His work evolved from compositions marked by symmetry towards more organic and less explicitly ordered forms. In it he addresses the relationship between human beings, nature, ecology, urban life and new technologies, attaching great importance to both the material treatment of the supports and the richness of chromatic nuances.
In addition to publishing articles and texts on art, he maintained a close relationship with the literary world. He collaborated with young poets of the seventies and eighties and illustrated, among other works, an edition of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories (2004), awarded by the Ministry of Education as the best edited book. He also participated in bibliophile editions such as Sinera (2012), with texts by Salvador Espriu, and Salveu-me la mirada (2016), based on poems by Miquel Martí i Pol.
He received, among other distinctions, the decoration of Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Government (1996), the second prize from the Ministry of Culture (2003) and the Award of Excellence from the Society for New Design in New York (1997).