Joan Boy

Joan Boy, to whom Juan Manuel Bonet took me, is the height of detachment and remoteness. He is the painter – whom very few people know – of pure landscapes in which natural objects (if we can call them that) are already stylised recreations. There are, among his, skies and clouds, red sunsets or blue mornings of two small pilgrim clouds, which at least remind me of those of Félix Vallotton, to say someone, or a painting by Ozenfant, simple and succinct. With my work,” he told me in a letter, “I refer to a reality recreated in the studio. The landscapes and the figures are elements of a fiction that deliberately detaches itself from the outside world in which, at the same time, it needs to recognise itself”. And yes, I have also seen some of his paintings that are tondos, with figures. I still don’t know why those naked, grey figures lead me to the image of souls purging their sorrow, as I see them as I read the Commedia.

And who could say of painting as Dante said of poetry: a “fictio rethorica in musica composita”.

Enrique Andrés Ruíz, La pintura en los tiempos del Arte (2008).