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Joan Barbarà Joan Barbarà's graphic work is characterized by his extensive experience and his penchant for experimentation About Joan Barbarà's Art Joan Barbarà has made prints for the most renowned of artists, from Miró to Beuys and Tàpies to Schumacher, for Hartung and Schultze, etc. Many Catalan artists have him to thank for the high quality of their etchings. The unusual wealth of artists in Catalonia has allowed him to prove his skills. Joan Barbarà is an alchemist in the techniques of graphic art, from etchings to aquatints, from poupée to the expressiveness of carborundum. F. Herlt remarks: 'In Paris Barbarà already attracted the attention of such great artists as Dunoyer de Segonzac, Miró, Braque, Chagall, Dalí and Picasso through his masterful handling of the copper plate, and lifelong friendships emerged. The color spectrum of his printing technique ranged from nuance-rich shades of the ever-noble black, to the most vivid of tones and color symphonies. Great artistic skill and high technical quality, a printer's eye as well as a painter's eye, all of these come into play when a copper-plate printer can read the artist's every wish. His Prints Is it any wonder that his desire has grown over the years to print his own works, having practiced the technique all his life? He takes joy in still lives, ornamentation and painting. He is spurred on by the desire to go beyond the general rules of printing techniques until the boundaries between painting and printing, collage and monotype are blurred. This holds particularly true for the methodology used in his earliest etching series from 1995, 'Negre sobre Negre' (Black on Black), in which he narrated a contemporary event: the burning of the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. The ruins of the opera house become the motif and shape the printing process. There is an interplay between structure and etched strokes, the depth of the fire in black. His structural and printing methods lead to an exhaustion of the copper plates. Joan Barbarà on this topic: 'La planche devient une ruine' (The plate becomes a ruin). Barbarà's graphics are marked by his enormously extensive experience. He is driven to experiment by his deep curiosity. Even though his artistic development has undergone changes, his style has remained his own despite all of the great influences he has been exposed to. He also began to stand out early in the field of book illustration. His profession of printer and his artwork combine: in 1988 at an exhibit of Antoni Tàpies' graphics in the Museu de l'Empordà, Barbarà held a workshop and led informal round table discussions on the art of printing, as he had often done before. In the same museum (see Joan Barbarà exhibit catalogue, Museu de l'Empordà, 1991) the artist showed the book 'Empúries - Inici d'un retorn, d'Alexis Eudald-Solà', by Enric Pujol from Figueres. It contains a series done by Barbarà in 1991, accompanied by paintings from 1992 with everyday themes: plates, vases, fruit, etc, arranged variously as still lives. ek |
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