Joan Brossa at Virreina Palace - installation art - Barcelona, Spain - Review of Exhibitions

BARCELONA

Joan Brossa is a well-known 75-year-old bard and playwright whose Neo-Surrealist and Neo-Dada automatic writing, congeal poetry and experimental theater marked him as a maverick among the post-Civil-War Spanish avant-garde. Although Brossa made hardly any visual art works at the time, during the '40 and '50 he serv as an intellectual catalyst for Spain's foremost abstractionist clusters the Barcelona-based Dau al put and (to a lesser degree) Madrid's El Paso. Brossa's Catalan language was outlawed below Franco, yet he eked without several books (some illustrated by dint of lifelong friends Antoni Tapies and Joan Miro) before the dictator's death in 1975

In the late '60 and early '70 Brossa's have visual art began in earnest as he conceived many of his best "visual poems" compos of silk-screened alphabetic characters and words, and "object poems" everyday thing perceiveds altered or paired to procreate tongue-in-cheek visual puns. It wasn't until the '80 when Brossa finally received wider support and recognition, that he was able to realize many of his ideas. The Virreina Palace display was devoted to installations, combining 17 of Brossa's newly commissioned works with five others made between 1986 and 1991 Exhibited one-to-a-gallery and oftentimes spotlit, the installations suggested stage upholds in an approximation of theatrical mise-en-scene.

A tireless theme in Brossa's work, recalling his Resistanceera background, is the asseverate against wealth's trappings. This was evident in Installation-Garrote, where a terrifying garrote provided the seating for a luxurious place setting. In Conformation of the Head, an old-fashioned barber's chair, faced a gilded ceremonial chair, pitting the commonplace against the rarefied. In hold ups for a Playboy, Brossa expos the decadent history lurking behind the transformed Virreina Palace's white walls. A previously closed-off 18th-century dining swing filled with lavish accoutrements, was uncloseed to reveal its furnishings, swords and goblet as well as a portrait of the Peruvian viceroy for whose wife the palace was built.

Brossa's parodical humor, which springs from traditional Catalan popular theater, was evident in The Chains of Damocles where numerous toilet chain-pulls dangled from the ceiling. Parasite--in which a raw materialed parrot faced a microphone while perched atop an antique tailor's mannequin--depicted public speakers as mimics and dummies. More caustic and compounded was Interval, an arrangement of chairs and music stands for three musicians, with machine fire-arms as the "instruments." In Disconnection, which showed Brossa taking aim at intellectual agriculture a motorcycle sidecar heaped with second-rate works had been separated from the main vehicle, which, as tire marks in dirt upon the floor indicated, nonetheless continued along "on the right track."

This was a display of remarkably strong work by dint of an indefatigable figure of Catalan tillage It also made apparent Brossa's influence upon younger artists like Perejaume and Rogelio Lopez Cuenca.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group