JOAN BROSSA, PROTAGONIST OF TWO GROUP EXHIBITIONS: ONE IN MEXICO AND THE OTHER AT THE PRATS NOGUERAS BLANCHARD GALLERY IN BARCELONA – Fundació Joan Brossa
At the end of this 2024, several pieces by Joan Brossa have taken part in two collective shows that have made us very happy: a collective in Mexico about poetic experimentation in the 60s and a relationship of friendship and creation with Chema Madoz at the Prats Nogueras Blanchard gallery in Barcelona.
The Museo Cabañas de Guadalajara (Mexico) inaugurated last November 29 the exhibition curated by Manuel Borja-Villel and entitled Reading by contact. Poetics and experimentation in Spain (1962-1972). This exhibition, carried out as part of the International Book Fair (FIL) 2024comprises an entire decade in which writing in Spain acted as a vector for experimentation through painting, music, poetry, theater and cinema. In this interdisciplinary and experimental conception of poetic writing, Joan Brossa has a particular representation and, in this exhibition, a resounding presence through visual poems, object poems, books and a selection of literary poems. The exhibition can be visited until next February 23.
The Prats Nogueras Blanchard gallery has dedicated its space in Barcelona to an exquisite exhibition on the relationship between images and objects by Joan Brossa and Chema Madoz, Juegos Reunidos. The installation, designed by Emiliana Design Studio, brings together for the first time works by the two creators: photographs by Chema Madoz and objects by Joan Brossa, relating the games of correspondences that are generated between the pieces and the artists. The exhibition can still be visited until next January 25 and Maria Canelles, co-director of the Liberal Arts Center, was responsible for the writing of the room text, of which we leave you an excerpt here:
When Jordi Coca asks Joan Brossa what a poem is, Brossa answers: “a concentration of language and an essay of correspondences”. The way both Joan Brossa and Chema Madoz look at, and represent, reality seems to be intent all the time on generating more and more correspondences, on inventing them. To force them, if it suits. As if the relationship between the individual and nature (reality, in short, that surrounds us) is truly the center of their research and that the most fruitful way they have to deepen this relationship is to demonstrate that everything is interconnected and that, therefore, any element of reality (however insignificant it may be – a shoe, a light bulb, a chess piece -) has a significant correspondence in the cosmos. The idea that hovers over Brossa and Madoz’s objects is that of a unified world in which anything can be transformed into anything else. Therefore, the summary of analogies, which is his objective work, is still an exercise in cataloging reality, that which is obvious, but above all that which is only visible through poetic eyes. Rocks, pebbles, trees, rain, drops of water, or the moon have their equivalents in the purest everyday objects. In things, oh well.
