Roser Grau
Art commentator
The silhouette of the Cadaqués church outlining over the packed white houses forms the centre of the village and, as Baltasar Porcel says, is as much well known, or even more than the Victory of Samotracia.
What is also well known is the capacity of convoking artistic manifestations that Cadaqués has enjoyed for a long time. It is not new to speak about the creators –and great international creators– who have been living there, such as Dalí, or who have spent long seasons – Marcel Duchamp and many others. (*)
The charms of this village, with its rough nature around and its geographic situation, fascinates, disturbs and attracts.
If the unconformism – to think or feel that things, reality, could be thought, as Faucault says, “in another way”– and if the capacity of transforming the world and this reality relays on the basis of creation, the concordance that Cadaqués offers between certain moods and interior restlessness, habilitates it for creation, for the creation of pictures, sculptures, prints, literature and every adventure of the soul.
But there also exists another kind of adventures to be taken within the art frame, divulgation of the art – made by gallerists – and analysis – by critics and people who gets it.
Probably, an exagerated fixation on the past of so many brilliant creators who have lived there – almost all of them dead today – may dilute the possibility of valorizing the present. And this is dangerous, because we could fall in that attitude of some old people who, in order to feel esteemed, to prove that are still alive, have to look backwards.
What we, and the present generation, are really concerned on is what is happening in Cadaqués right now.
Nowadays – summer ’88 – for eighth time, an annual exhibition takes place which, from a small world, almost a microcosmos, has been increasing and extending like subtil tentacles, up to unexpected corners, in more than fifty countries that, year by year, keep an appointment in the MINI PRINT INTERNATIONAL, Cadaqués.
The exhibition of the MINI PRINT INTERNATIONAL – Cadaqués in the Taller Galeria Fort, even being a very important exhibition, formed by small format prints – 10 x 10 cm – made by different techniques and styles and also cosmogonies and playful or trascendent perceptions of the things, and relationships between men and background, is much more than a mere plastic event, every year.
It is a human adventure, in its widest meaning acceptation of the word, understanding adventure as a risk. Adventure also as a discovery or as a challenge of uncertain results.
The human adventure is the physical presence of many participant artists, the winners of the event –coming as well from Hungary or Peru as from England or Japan– who make a monographic exhibition. Also because they come to print, to learn, to improve or to search in the Pascual Fort’s workshop. They know each other and relationships of affinity and inquietude among them are stablished, again within the public who visit the event every year, they vote their own preferences and buy the miniprint with the collector’s avidity or with the discovery’s surprise.
The participant artists know and live with the Fort family, with the people from the village in which houses they normally take lodging, and assist to the official inauguration every year. They have the opportunity of getting in touch with the local authorities, the “consellers” and catalan culture representatives. The little room of the gallery becomes prodigiously, throughout Fort’s creating capacity, a world of interchanging languages –verbal and plastic– of friendship ties.
But the adventure doesn’t end here. MINI PRINT INTERNATIONAL – Cadaqués, moves, travels, spreads throughout Catalonia.
During 1982/83 and 1987 the Generalitat de Catalunya, in 1984/85 and 86 the foundation “la Caixa”, and the very same Taller Galeria Fort in 1981 and 1988 have managed make it known in most of the Catalan villages,on autumn and during the winter, and thanks to this travelling show, the inhabitants from Igualada or Lleida, Boston or Korea, have been able to watch the little “rooms” from Poland, Morocco or Canada.
What travelling adventure will take place in this year’s Mini Print International of Cadaqués, 1988?
* “Cent anys de pintura a Cadaqués” Joan Josep Tharrats, Edicions del Cotal, S.A. Barcelona, 1981.
Pascual Fort
Taller Galeria Fort
The incorporation of new printing techniques has been a constant in the exhibitions of the Mini Print International of Cadaqués, which is open to all artists and printing techniques, as it has been stated in the entry forms since its first convoking in 1980.
LASER PRINT, after COPY-ART, has become the newest technique, and although it does not proceed from a metal or wooden plate printed in the traditional way, it has the indispensable and necessary features to be considered as original printed work, such as: the creativity, the originality, the colour, the possibility of making a limited editon, depending on the artist’s willing, each work being exactly the same as its previous, its posterior and the plate created and recorded, this time, on a magnetic disquette.
Together with these new aportations to the techniques of expression and multiple stamping, we cannot forget the constant personnal little aportations from some printing artists who, by investigating on the traditional printing techniques, renew and keep alive this Art, year by year.
These features, tradition and novelty, conform this harmonious whole that every year awakes the interest of the visiting public as well in Cadaqués as in the travelling show celebrated afterwards.
Such is the interest in visiting the Mini Print International of Cadaqués, that, as the public has asked and so the Cadaqués Council, we have enlarged the visiting days from 30 to 75, uninterruptedly.
It is also comforting to observe that, in this year’s exhibition in Cadaqués, the amount of works that have been acquired by visitors and collectors has risen a 40% from the ones before, what confirms the interest that has been awaken.
All this encourages us to continue the task of diffusing the art of printing through the Mini Print International of Cadaqués, in all its techniques, specialities and possibilities.
We do welcome the personalities who integrate the Comitee of Honour in the Mini Print International of Cadaqués. We do thank the Honourable Mr. Joan Guitart, Conseller de Cultura of the Generalitat de Catalunya, for his presence in the official inauguration, as well as the collaboration given by the press, radio and television, and the members of the Jury. Finally, we do congratulate all the artists accepted to participate in this eighth version as well as the 12 selected winners.