MONTMELÓ, 1931 – 2021 Baqués

The rigorous technical training, the imaginative capacity and the very personal and original style, while suggestive and sensitive, are the most characteristic features of his work.

BIOGRAPHY

Son of peasants, he lived his first years in direct contact with the land, but those quiet times were interrupted by the Civil War and the subsequent postwar period, during which his family moved to Barcelona.

From a very young age he made money with a pencil and a brush. He worked as draftsman, comic book artist and movie posters. In 1957 we found him as head of graphic design studio of an advertising company. It did not take him long to set up his own studio, the Estudio Baqués, where he already highlighted his creative spirit, for which he received several awards: Delta de Plata, in 1962, and the Laus de diseño, in 1971.

Professor of graphic design at the Official School of Advertising of Barcelona and professor at the Massana School, he delves into the field of his artistic activity through the experimentation of techniques and composition.

It is not easy to describe the style of Josep Baqués. The rigorous technical training, the imaginative capacity and the very personal and original style, while suggestive and sensitive, will be the most characteristic features of his work. In his painting we find a magical, mysterious and symbolic world; in this way the mixture of unreality and reality that transits through dreams is concentrated.

JOSEP BAQUÉS AND HIS ALWAYS YOUNG WAY OF ACTING

by Josep M. Cadena

Baroque and surreal, imaginative and classic, respectful to the maximum with the forms, but at the same time transgressive with them to make combinations in which heaviness is combined with lightness, Josep Baqués is a painter who gives strength to irony by opposing the images. And although he captures us by these, the true force of permanence of his work is found in what he tells us about them.

I think he knows them all and that with his expository ability he can do very different things. If he wanted, he could be included in the most opposed styles and triumph once in the practice of all of them. But he has a creative honesty that prevents him from breaking with his own norms, which by themselves are already quite transgressive, because he has managed to bring to the real painting everything he knew how to demonstrate as a graphic designer with surprising drawings in which he liquefies the material, It gave flesh and bone consistency to a series of figures.

When I see the horses with stork legs, as well as ceramics and tureens that belong to the material made dream, I always think that the ideas are above the realities from which they come. And I think Baqués knows very well that without the senses there is no thought that can stand, but that has found the way we see reality by its transcendent virtues and not by what it means as an exploitable element in relation to what they are. our needs marked by day to day. He always goes further and from the wealth of forms goes to the denunciation of poverty in the feelings, as well as the joy of what is pleasant helps us to pass, for what we think, to the sadness for the shortcomings that continuously press.

I believe that the work of Josep Baqués has a deeper reading than what has usually been done about it. The painter is a character who thinks and who does not give any brushstrokes without knowing that, within the lights and shadows of each work there is a reason to live according to a transcendental will. In the same way that casdacun of us must remain for what he thinks and does in truth, his artistic work pursues an exit towards permanence in relation to future generations. That is why it has the great virtue of staying young-leaving aside the ages, which here have nothing to do in thought and in pictorial action.