A biographical sketch of a Catalan brush painter

JOAQUIM PIJOAN was born one spring day in the Aro valley, north-east of Spain, between Barcelona and the French border, by the Costa Brava seaside, the same year as the Israel state was proclaimed. Their parents, and all his family were humble hard working people who, generation after generation, have made, with a heavy hand, the landscape of l'Empordà region, a Catalan little Tuscany bathed by Mediterranean waters and the north wind coming from the French Provence, the mistral there, the tramontana here, a wind that cleans the sky and inspired its greatest writer, Josep Pla, the Catalan literary builder of our inner landscape and soul of XXth century and our Catalan language's heritage preserver, persecuted and forbdiden those years by the fascist Spanish dictador Francisco Franco. He remembers those days as dark and hard times for his mother country but happy and innocent temps des cerises for him, the seaside was a real wild landscape as it has been since the Greeks and Romans established there more than 2000 years ago. Now he has a deep and sad feeling of having lost his paradise.

Some twenty something years after his chilhood he moved to Barcelona searching for a wide and big town centralized cultural life, he made several attempts to study Arts and Literature but failed to achieve any academically right minded and oficially scheduled study. Life and travelling to different European cities made him who he is nowadays: A schizopainter. The long run to arrive to that state of grace has been put it on several unpublished romans and notebooks, travel diaries, and following his passion for mail art, a compulsive amount of letters and postcards to nobody, which means to everybody. All this literacy work, written in Catalan, is unpublished right now, maybe because failure is his main goal in life, and also for being a lost causes' follower, because Catalan language will dissapear in 50 years' time, according to the apocaliptic philologists... prophecy we have paid while we were struggling for a drop of hope. That's global market war, my friend. He knows that old sad song quite well, and that's the reason why painting is his main activity right now as an artist engaged in a fight against himself, first, and against his past, afterwards, aware that future doesn't exist, he writes endlessly...

So no high school diploma, no art master, no guides and no teachers, just life on the road, as a Kerouac from the eighties, from the Madrid Museum El Prado with his Velázquez and Goya masterworks to Paris Jeu de Paume impressionists, The Louvre and Leonardo's Gioconda's  smile following him, devoted to Matisse and Picasso everywhere, drawing in the cafès and squares, from the Florentian Uffizi with Botticelli and Piero Della Francesca to Michelangello's Sixtine chapel frescos... Nell mezzo del cammin della sua vita he took a turn into the Anglosaxon world in an attempt to get rid of fighting against himself, against the strength of a real Spanish bull, armoured by his deep love for his ancestral countryside, in an attempt to change the direction of his so sensitive and altered mind empirically. That's the reason why I'm now able to tell you a brief summary of my trip around my life time's clock. Next stop: Trafalgar Square. If I have never been to the National Gallery and met Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, now I wouldn't be able to write a single literary word. I'm safe and healthy. The nightmare is over. Painting, and to be precise, a certain and personal way of painting, saved him from the danger of his mind's black hole established in his bloody writer's life , and returned him to his country, fresh and renewed. Today he works in Barcelona and his natal Aro valley, just making paintings come true. Now and then, he writes a painter's notebook and traveller's diaries. He doesn't take more care over his literary failure as a nouveau roman writer. Some local collegues and amateurs if asked about his life and work would say about him: he's just a dilettante... Maybe they are right. That biography is really a dilettante's chronicle. But what's XXIst century art if not a dilettantesque attempt to achieve a neoeverything in all the fields of the artistic work? We deserve what we have: always remembering the avantgardes and past times.

He married Sachiko, a cool and balanced Japanese woman from the Kansai region, located in the main island of Honshu, born in Kobe town, with whom he has a son. They travel once a year to Japan, where he discovered the floating world and fell in love with Utamaro and Hokusai's works, as Van Gogh and Gauguin had been influenced by Japanese paintings some hundred and something years ago. Devoted to Japanese traditions and culture, from sushi to sumo, from Kabuki to Noh theater, the sad beauty of female Oriental eyes made him a Zen lover of the lit up smile and made him bowed down to the gentle people from this sophisticated and ceremonious culture, the land of shinto, life wrapped with the delicate smell of seasonally blossomed cherry trees. Beauty is as volatile as happiness, unpredictable as a Matsuo Basho haiku written through Oku's path. He drinks sake reading novels by Endo and Tanizaki, relaxes every night in a public onsen dreaming the final awakening of his life, there, far away of his land, near the sea from Japan, looking at the Fujisan white snow as a devoted monk from a golden pavillon burnt once and for ever as his past has burnt.

Non, il ne regrette rien...

Let's play shamisen for a while. He is just a gaijin painter.

Sayonara. JP