“I don’t know if they can see anything from up there, but I’m sure they would be very happy.” Joan Gardy Artigas (Boulogne-Billancourt, 1938) imagines her father, Josep Llorens Artigas, and Joan Miró jumping for joy knowing that The large mural that the three of them created in 1970 for the Barcelona airport, now lost in the old terminal, will be moved to T1, the main entrance door for visitors arriving in Barcelona. “Ricardo Bofill already wanted to change its location. while projecting T1, ‘Joanet, we would have to move the mural’, I told him yes, it was possible, but where was there a place to put it? willing to collaborate in whatever they need. But hurry up!” The artist who was a friend and worked alongside Chagall, Braque, Calder and Giacometti will turn 86 in June.
Joan Gardy Artigas, whom everyone calls Joanet, began collaborating with the Artigas-Miró tandem when he was a vigorous and unprejudiced 15-year-old teenager – “they were already older and I was the one who assumed the physical work that they could not cope with.” , and with great pleasure” – and when his father was injured by Alzheimer’s, he became the artist’s new accomplice for his great ceramic projects. To assemble the pieces of the gigantic mural of the Barcelona airport (4,865 pieces, fifty meters wide and ten meters high) they had to purposely build a new workshop that over time has ended up being transformed into the beautiful home that Joanet shares with his wife Mako Ishikawa, also a ceramist.
The house is located in the town of Gallifa, less than an hour from Barcelona, ??where Josep Llorens i Artigas bought Mas del Racó in the mid-1950s, a farmhouse next to a Romanesque church from the 11th century, where he established his place. in the world, surrounded by pines, oaks, poplars and olive trees. From its five wood-fired ovens came the murals of UNESCO, the United Nations in New York, Harvard University, the Maeght Foundation, the Guggenheim, the Barcelona airport and the IBM one, which was transplanted in 2013 to the MNAC. Also the Pla de l’Os de la Rambla or the gigantic sculpture Dona i ocell.
“The association was a success because it was based on friendship and there was no ego fight,” reflects the artist, who lets out a mischievous laugh when remembering that, in the run-up to the airport project, Miró received a call from the Air Ministry to to attend an interview in Madrid. “He told me ‘I’m not going, you go Joanet.’ I explained it to them and they thought everything was magnificent. When I was leaving, they go and say to me: ‘You who seem to know him well, tell us, who is this Mr. Miró?'”
Around the kitchen table, the anecdote is celebrated by Mako, his wife, and their son, Isao, painter and director of the Fundació Tallers Josep Llorens Artigas, a building designed by Bruce Graham, author of the Sears Tower in Chicago or the Hotel Arts in Barcelona, ??with which Joan Gardy Artigas had collaborated on buildings built halfway around the world. Artists such as Barry Flanagan, Medina Campeny, Vilató and Frederic Amat attend his workshops and residencies every year, who left his installation Pits de Gallifa on one of his façades. Joanet moves from one room to another in a small electric car.
He went to Paris at the age of 17, taking advantage of the trip of the truck that transported the mosaics for the UNESCO mural. “Imagine, in Gallifa there was not a single girl! And once there, she did not want to return.” He settled in the workshop that his father had abandoned during the German occupation, enrolled in the Louvre School of Fine Arts and began to exhibit at the Maeght and Lelong alongside Braque, Chagall, Calder and Giacometti, who encouraged him. to be a sculptor (“I couldn’t make large ceramics in the oven in the Paris workshop, which was very small, and he told me: ‘then make sculpture’”) and who in the summers he took as co-pilot in his Citroën 2CV on his travel trips. Round trip from Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat to the Maeght Foundation, chatting about art and stopping every now and then for shots of whiskey and pastis.
The young artist who would later stroll through Paris dressed in black in a white Morgan convertible, became friends with Picasso thanks to Miró, who opened the doors of the Californie to him. “We walked in and there were four large sculptures. When he saw the head of one of them, Miró blurted out: ‘This is mine!’ Picasso hugged him and said: ‘No, Joan, this is our soul.’ Picasso was very clever and Miró was right: he had copied him. But how do you defend yourself against someone who said that artists are thieves and murderers?” Picasso was not there, but he would have loved to join the secret excursion that years later Joanet himself, along with his father and Miró, took them at night in a black limousine to the house of an erotic art collector in Tokyo. “Everything was very clandestine. He received us along with his daughters and his wife. We didn’t understand anything. But after having tea he said girls out, and one of his collaborators came in with prints of Hokusai, of Moronobu… A marvel.”
In Gallifa’s workshop rest the sculptures still under construction that he is half making with Vilató for an exhibition, Germans de fang, for the Ceramic Museum of Valencia, and on a table awaits for review the catalog of the exhibition that will open in July in Can Mario of the Vila Casas Foundation (The Rebel Hand, curated by Ricard Bru). Perhaps the time has come for the creator of the monumental Earth and Fire, on Diagonal, with public works in half the world, to be known beyond his status as the son of Llorens Artigas or collaborator of Miró.
“I’m not vain. Vanity is useless. Great artists are simple and humble. The arrogant are worthless. I have done everything: drawings, lithographs, sculptures, ceramics, bronzes… And above all I have been free. “No one has ever told me what time I had to get up.”
