Arte Canals/Art on paper/Juan Canals

Juan Canals Carreras.  Bibliografia

 

When I was a child, my parents worked at weekends and, unable to look after us, they would leave my siblings and me at my grandmother’s and aunts’ house. This was in the city of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat. From that time, I remember the pleasant, rhythmic sound of the nearby trains passing by, the tick‑tock of a wall clock, and a framed illustration of a biblical scene in which a child was crying. Time seemed to pass slowly and rhythmically.

 

I also remember my boredom on Sunday mornings when we went to mass. My mother’s family was Catholic, and we were taken to church, though the sermons bored me enormously. I tried to pass the time by looking at the mural paintings on the walls and imagining stories from them.

 

All of this happened a long time ago…

 

Curiously, I ended up studying Pictorial Techniques and Mural Painting. I graduated in Applied Arts and continued studying other subjects. I worked in many different trades: in the metal industry, in the postal service, in art workshops, as a colour specialist in a historical‑architectural studio, in chromatic consultancy and restoration, as a house painter and, of course, in my studio producing artwork whenever possible—although I would say that this last profession tends to absorb money rather than generate it.

 

To produce my work, I always rented individual studios. In 1992, I had to leave my first studio because, at the end of the contract, the rent was doubled. It was the time of the Barcelona Olympic Games, and rents rose dramatically. I moved to another beautiful space, but it had serious damp problems; later I went to live in a small mountain village; then I returned to the city. Eventually, I found a large and affordable studio in L’Hospitalet, where I once again heard the sound of the trains passing nearby—memories that took me back to childhood.

 

Over the years, that space and the surrounding neighbourhood, once a disused industrial area, became fashionable and was transformed into the city’s Cultural District. My rent rose sharply again, this time by 70%, so I decided to leave. In search of a large and affordable space, I ended up about fifty kilometres away, near the town of Vilafranca del Penedès—curiously, the other territory from which my paternal ancestors come, and where I also spent part of my childhood and adolescence.

 

At the same time, I rented—and still maintain—a small space in the Raval neighbourhood of Barcelona. It is where I currently live and, in many ways, the studio from which most of my work has emerged. My space in Vilafranca has gradually become more of a storage room; the distance simply isn’t practical.

 

My training began in vocational studies in the metal sector. I liked the idea of machines transforming materials and creating objects, but I soon realised that I was learning to operate a machine in order to spend a lifetime perhaps making the same piece over and over again in an enclosed space. That longing many people have for a fixed, stable, routine and indefinite job has always terrified me.

 

A long teachers’ strike during those years led me to spend time in a local library, reading everything I could. I became fascinated by advertising and graphic design, and that impulse led me to abandon my metal studies and enrol in Art School, initially to study Graphic Design. But once again, I changed direction and moved to the speciality of Mural Painting and Pictorial Techniques. Later, I studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts. I always combined my studies with a variety of jobs, and eventually I left the Faculty because I wanted to devote more time to being in the studio, making work. During that period, I held my first exhibition in a commercial gallery, which consisted of sculptures. Later, I focused more on painting, especially on paper-based work.

 

Most recently, I held a solo exhibition in the city of Logroño, Spain. It was an installation of small-format cars made of lime mortar and painted in fresco. In a way, the material used is the same as that employed in mural painting since the Middle Ages, except that in this case I did not apply the mortar to a wall but poured it into moulds I had previously made. My intention with this installation was to create a small homage to petrol cars.