Biography

JOSEP MONCADA JUANEDA was born in Mahon, Menorca in 1967 and trained as a painter at the Massana and Llotja Schools of Art in Barcelona under Rafel Jofre and Isidre Manils. He has participated in group exhibitions in Barcelona, Madrid, Menorca and Mallorca, earning first prize at the Festes St. Bartomeu, Ferreries (2001) and was voted 'favourite artist' at the Premi St. Antoni, Menorca (2003), when he was also awarded a scholarship by the Talens España. Josep Moncada has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 2003.

Josep Moncada

The Spanish painter Josep Moncada develops what he sees as his primary agenda: to identify and record those moments of brief sensory pleasure in everyday life which go by largely unnoticed and unrecorded - responses and sensations no more than skin-deep, which he communicates through a classic Catalan vocabulary of sun, sand, seawater and compliant flesh, achieving something approaching a new slant on Berenson's celebrated 'tactile values'.

Focus is more exclusively on hands, legs, feet lapped by shallow water at the sea's edge, a finger- and toe-tip response to the friendly overtures of Gaia as gravity is gently challenged. Here there is also a readiness to convey movement: the movement of light on water, water as it envelopes limbs, dries on skin, escapes through fingers. In these paintings, feet, hands, legs (just those extremities shunned by so many painters) become the gateway to another level of expressiveness. 'Often', comments Moncada, 'I feel I am looking into a mirror that is, for me, the woman… This painting may be a way for me to come to know myself'.

The directness and simplicity of Moncada's paintings does not distance them from their genesis within contemporary Spanish culture. The impression of emancipation, of unlimited possibilities that continues to characterise so much in the arts of post-Franco Spain is strengthened and anchored in Moncada by qualities to be identified with his adopted homeland, Catalunya, where he received his artistic training. The uncompromising, in-your-face directness of his imagery surely owes much to Catalan seny (the opposite of Castilian duende, the aloofness of traditional, spiritual Spain), not unmingled with just a hint, barely suppressed, of the even earthier rauxa, the well-known Catalan propensity for Dionysiac abandon.

There beckons in Moncada's art a serenity, bringing with it something more universal. As in some of Europe's most ancient, Neolithic art (like the Willendorf Venus), some degree of exaggeration or distortion in the figures reminds us that the body viewed in these paintings is as familiar as the artist's own, moulded in the shadow of the cave.

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