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THE ERMOUPOLI PROJECT

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THE PROJECT
 

Joan–Carles Roca Sans was born in Barcelona in 1946. He studied Business Administration at ESADE and Fine Arts at Sant Jordi High School.

We should examine his artistic proposal in the light of its internal coherence, as he is an artist who experienced the post modern movements of the 1980s first hand in Germany and in the United States and who, despite this —or maybe thanks to it— has always constructed his own language, not based on representative licences, but based on his own convictions, drawing and painting life, love and death as recurrent themes, in an attempt to offer a personal vision of the human condition.

A metaphor of life, reminiscent of ancestral nomadism and crossings that engender new odysseys, the renovating capacity of travelling is inherent to artistic creation. A beach of coloured marbles, based in the town of Ermoupoli in the Greek island of Syros, the desire to regain one’s youth, the transformative power of travel, where what matters is the journey and not the arrival, have given rise to this work completed between 2005 and 2018.

The Ermoupoli Project continues the literary tradition that arose during the Renaissance: a collection of varied texts, where several characters have experiences that transform their lives, with the common denominator that they all take place on the shores of the Mediterranean.

The Project is characterised by love for the experiment, the understanding of the artistic experience as a fragment and as a fusion of different anthropological planes: emotion and concept, playfulness and seriousness, reason and feeling, order and chaos.

The interest in new technologies grows with the development of the project. The new and the old are two sides of the same coin. Commitment to creative freedom without borders or artistic hierarchies where sensitive supports (painting, sculpture, photography, video and installations) depend on the communicative intention and the material collected on each trip.

Roca Sans aims to do away with the barriers that separate new supports from old ones, and show that art does not progress in a linear way but that it advances by updating its origin.

Some aspects of the avant–garde today still remain relevant. But, in the crisis of the “big narratives of emancipation”, the current idea of a project like Ermoupoli must be necessarily much more specific and contextual, linked with the idea of transmitting a personal vision of life and a possible transformation of the conscience.

The Ermoupoli Project includes 14 fictional stories, 300 paintings with their preparatory sketches, 500 digital drawings, 12 video format graphic novels, 70 sculptures and 30 trips made between 2005 and 2008.

 

“Only in the fragment it is possible
to find the truth”
BERTOLT BRECHT
 

ATRIUM TORROELLA SLU

 

Atrium Torroella is a cultural management company that backs the Ermoupoli Project and produces it.