Paisaje onírico con personajes (Figures in a dream landscape)

Technique

Ink on card

Dimensions

Paper size: 56, 5 × 41 cm
Frame size: 85 x 73 x 4 cm

Inventory

FM000317

Description

In his Autobiographical Chronology, Ponç states: «El Dau al Set was deeply impregnated with my spirit, being the only one who remained faithful to it over the years […]. My work has always revolved around magic, and, without a doubt, magic was the essence of Dau al Set» (Lassaigne, Barcelona, 1987. p. 41).

Indeed, Ponç seems to embody better than any other member of the group the spirit that characterized all the forms of Dau al Set. This group was founded in Barcelona in 1948 by the painters Antoni Tàpies, Modest Cuixart and Joan Josep Tharrats, the philosopher Arnau Puig and the poet Joan Brossa, and had the regular collaboration of the poet and critic Juan Eduardo Cirlot and the painter Josep Guinovart. His activities, among which the publication of a magazine of the same title stands out which continued to be published until 1956, had as an essential characteristic a spirit of skeptical surrealist heritage that has traditionally been called «magicist». Along with magic, a corrosive sense of humor, probably related both to Brossa’s personality and the decisive influence of Miró and Klee, and a clear desire to rebel against everything established, are the essential components of the activity of this mythical group which breaks into the panorama of postwar Barcelona in an irreverent and cosmopolitan manner. And these same characteristics are, certainly, applicable to all of Ponç’s work, which does not undergo major changes once the group’s life is over and whose artistic language is fundamentally based on the predominance of a meticulous drawing.

Ponç, who in 1946 had previously founded with Arnau Puig the magazine Algol —−a name used by Arab astrologers for the devil——, and who would later, between 1953 and 1963, settle in Brazil, fascinated by its exuberant and mysterious nature, continued developing until the end of his career an enigmatic world of hybrid and metamorphosing characters, surrounded by indecipherable symbols and set in landscapes of complex construction. This dreamlike landscape with characters shows a linear precision and a profusion of signs that make it very close to the drawings done by Tàpies in the second half of the forties, although it lacks the aggression which always remains in Ponç tempered by a demystifying sarcasm in which the borders between the natural and civilized, the seen and dreamed, the animal and human, disappear.

[María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco]