Joan Carles Roca Sans was born in Barcelona in 1946. At the age of twenty-five, with a degree in Business Studies from Esade and a short career as a teacher and consultant, the pull of his artistic vocation inspired him to leave it all behind and he decided to settle in the Empordà. Now, almost four decades later, taking on and accepting the pseudo-marginalisation that this geographical decision has inflicted on him, he is convinced that he made the right choice and that this is where he is meant to be. He laments the destruction that the Empordà has been subjected to over the years, the transformation in the appearance of the villages and places that used to be idyllic, the paradoxical defence, at all costs, of the territory by the same people who shortly before had invaded it and assaulted it. Despite all this, the Empordà fascinates him. This fascination can be seen in the placid smile of the artist when he proudly invites you to contemplate the mosaic of roof tiles that you can see from the terrace of his home in the centre of Torroella de Montgrí.
His showroom, Atrium Torroella, is found on the ground floor of this old 16th-century palace, Casa Quintana Badia, which is built around an interior courtyard. The raison d’être of the area was the artist’s conviction that art is a living, participative thing. Atrium is an area for exhibiting and exchanging, in which he alternates his own proposals with those of other authors, such as the foreign artists who he invites each year to offer a temporary show.
Roca Sans, aware of and satisfied with his role as a visual artist, states that he is basically a communicator. Visual art is a need of the human species that moves us to communicate by means of images, in the same way as we do with our ears and with speech. In his opinion, communication through images involves the use of a figurative code, and he also claims the need for an implicit concept. If there is no concept, art is decoration; if there is only concept, it is also communication, but I don’t know if it is visual art”, he says. He clarifies that it is essential to be quite clear about what it is that one wants to transmit and also to “get to know the communicative strategies of the trade.
Within the context of an artistic career developed under the motto that art is communication, Roca Sans has always worked around his desire to tell stories. For a long time, these stories were linked to his own biography, but from here on, he has started to narrate the lives of other people. At present, this is crystallised in the so-called Ermoúpoli Project, a collection of stories with the Mediterranean as a common theme; not in a documentary format, but as fiction. They are stories that I build from existential experiences, he adds. In this project, the main theme of an interesting show that he is presenting all this summer in the exhibition rooms of Can Mario, the art space that the Vila Casas has in Palafrugell, arose. The exhibition is called Two-Faced Janus in the Apocalypse Cave and it brings together a series of works which, between the past and the future, discredit the myth of Saint John with arguments tainted with spirituality, a proposal that was already being thought about by the artist long before Dan Brown published his popular The Da Vinci Code. They are creations which, more than being marble and sculpture on methacrylate, play on all levels between yesterday and tomorrow, between the most primitive techniques and the new technologies, between the purest image and the most heavily manipulated one, between light and darkness, emptiness and fullness, order and chaos, Apollonius and Dionysus, man and woman. Everything is bipolar and the key lies in placing it all in dialogue and achieving the balance.
The exhibition consists of three differentiated areas —Museu del Ritual, El Panteó del Temps and Deambulatori de les promeses complertes— and the ending, a shower of irony around the myth of Salome, by means of which secular spirituality is claimed.// TINA CASADEMONT
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