Joanic Geniüt

Med­i­cine is the pro­fes­sion I learnt, an artist is what I am.” This is how Joan Dal­mau, aka Joanic Geniüt, de­scribes him­self. His show, Tris­tos Tòpics, is still on until March 16 at the Fun­dació Valvi in Girona, and he in­vited us into his stu­dio, part of La Volta pro­ject, in the Sant Narcís neigh­bour­hood to share the main el­e­ments of his artis­tic uni­verse with us.

1. Cròniques feréstegues, the name of a sort of diary I am writ­ing, with philo­soph­i­cal, lit­er­ary and per­sonal re­flec­tions, which I up­load to my blog (www.​feresteq.​com). I de­cided to be­come one of the items fea­tur­ing in this sec­tion, ma­nip­u­lat­ing the orig­i­nal photo and giv­ing it a sur­real, fan­tasy look. First, be­cause I like to laugh at the char­ac­ter I por­tray, of the post-mod­ern artist con­vinced that his work will be­come suc­cess­ful, who ac­cepts the anachro­nis­tic rules of power in the world of art. All this is in­trin­sic to the process of con­cep­tu­al­is­ing my work.

2. Paint­ing. As an artist, I am rad­i­cally self-taught. I started with clas­sic painters and then I went on to ex­per­i­ment­ing on my own. My paint­ing is fig­u­ra­tive, it vi­su­ally por­trays recog­nis­able el­e­ments, and I usu­ally paint human soli­tude, soli­tary char­ac­ters, and in­te­rior land­scapes, via a meta­phys­i­cal, lyri­cal or po­etic fil­ter.

3. Prints of Sant Narcís. I made an expo with en­grav­ings and prints of Sant Narcís as a trib­ute to the neigh­bour­hood where I spent the first years of my life, and where I es­tab­lished my stu­dio.

4, 6, 13. Minia­ture the­atre, paper fig­ures, con­serves. Since I started dig­i­tal il­lus­tra­tion, I wanted to ma­te­ri­alise this work. This came out as tri-di­men­sional fig­ures, the ma­te­ri­al­i­sa­tion of vec­to­r­ial works: the­atre, paper fig­ures, paper in a glass pot.

5. Tsinebox. I was asked to par­tic­i­pate in a pro­ject in Berlin, cen­tred around cin­ema. It is a pro­jec­tor sim­i­lar to Cin­e­mix, as I am quite in­ter­ested in the cin­e­matic process, and on the whole it was a very en­rich­ing ex­pe­ri­ence.

7, 9. En­grav­ing, screen print­ing, was my pro­ject as an artist in res­i­dence at La Volta. I spent a few years mak­ing them and I de­vel­oped a very low-cost work­shop, I built a press my­self, and made etch­ings, screen prints and en­grav­ings. I like the chal­lenge of mak­ing things with my own hands. The next step would be to open a screen print­ing work­shop for every­one in­ter­ested in par­tic­i­pat­ing.

8, 10. Mo­bile press, La Col­lita. In the past few years, I’ve had quite a con­nec­tion with music and made var­i­ous Croniques fer­estegues in con­certs. I was in­vited a few times to Afònica, to make an il­lus­trated chron­i­cle of the fes­ti­val, and I made an an­i­mated video clip, La Col­lita, for a song by Ma­zoni. I did a a per­for­mance that con­sisted of mak­ing a live en­grav­ing of the con­cert. Peo­ple would come and print their own copy of the en­grav­ing after the con­cert. The pro­ject is still open and I’d like to ex­pend it by work­ing with mu­se­ums or other artists.

11. Pad print­ing.I spent a lot of time learn­ing to make ink pads my­self. It is a bit anachro­nis­tic, and quite rigid and re­lated to old pro­fes­sions, but I find that using it is won­der­ful as a tech­nique for artis­tic ex­pres­sion.

12. Tris­tos tòpics, the show on at Fun­dació Valvi. The venue is large and there are lots of walls to fill. It was a chal­lenge for me and it also helped me to de­fine my­self. It ex­plores this tragi­comic image of the artist. It is ridicu­lously funny from the out­side, but when you find your­self in this sit­u­a­tion, it is quite sad.