Àngel Jové, multidisciplinary and multifaceted artist, painter, author of numerous installations and performances, poet, actor and interior and graphic designer, and a great friend of EINA, has left us last October. Born in 1940 in Lleida, Jové was a pioneer in the introduction of Arte Povera in our country. In 1968 he signed the Painters' Manifesto published in the magazine La Mosca, strongly linked to EINA.
Magazine La Mosca design by America Sanchez.
In 1969 he co-authored with Antoni Llena Primera Mort, the first surviving piece of video art in Spain.
He used photographic printing on canvas, altering the image with collage and sepia-coloured dyes to give it a certain nostalgic touch. The works are framed with a gilt moulding.
Inscription by Àngel Jové, 1977. Mixed media on paper.
And it is precisely Antoni Llena who remembers the figure of Àngel Jové with these words:
"Àngel Jové, a great artist without a CV, has died.
Wikipedia has practically no mention of his life. It only says that he was a Catalan artist, born in Lleida and died in Girona. A multidisciplinary artist.
And, it highlights the works: S.T. (Triptych) S.T. sense títol (Marius Torres series).
Children: Duna Jover.
Like ladybirds, these endangered fireflies, Àngel Jové has gone through life protected by a shell, a shell that unfolded and transformed into wings.
Untouched, he has maintained the fiction of art. That is: without botching the chimera that allows us to be human.
He has won the battle!
He has planted countless seeds, seeds that have already fermented. Then destined to be only flowers of the margin. Voiceless 'facts' that proclaim only one certainty: that progress is sustained by cataclysms".
Antoni Llena, Silvia Gubern and Àngel Jové. Photo: Antoni Bernad.
At EINA, Àngel Jové is best remembered for his ephemeral art performance in 1969 with the Grup del Maduixer (the name of the house where they met) formed by Àngel Jové, Jordi Galí, Silvia Gubern, Antoni Llena and Albert Porta (Evru), invited by Alexandre Cirici.
Logo of the Sala Zeleste, designed by Silvia Gubern.
In 1973 Àngel Jové and Silvia Gubern designed the interior of the legendary Sala Zeleste in Carrer Plateria, and the alabaster lamps Babel and Zeleste, specially designed for this venue, were so successful that they were later produced by Santi Roqueta.
Zeleste lamp, designed by Àngel Jové.
In 2014, to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Alexandre Cirici, a founding member of the school to whom we owe the name EINA, invited the former members of the Grup del Maduixer to carry out some Actions and show their work, in an event curated by Àlex Mitriani.
Book 'Recordar Cirici', with graphic design by Josep Bagà.
The work presented by Àngel Jové at this event is untitled and is made with mixed media on paper accompanied by a sculpture-object. A work from 2013 modified in 2014 with the inscription 'To Alexandre Cirici. In memoriam', it is part of the EINA Art Fund.
In the book 'Recordar Cirici', Àlex Mitriani comments that the work belongs to a series on emptiness based on the invocation of a taxidermy collection. Jové saw a stuffed fox, in the manner of a macabre naturalistic still life mounted on a tree trunk, and he then represented the trunk without the dead animal, to the point of the fiction of life.
All that remained was an absolutely enigmatic absence, an object-support, an old pseudo-realist base with no apparent meaning, but which came from an act of representation and simulation, from a failed capture of life. What remains is an absence that makes much more sense than all the fictions and mystifications with which humanity often reconstructs reality.
There is no sentimentality in Jové's work, but a strangeness that provokes and unsettles the viewer. On the velvety greyness of the painting, Jové stamped a seal with the inscription: 'To Alexandre Cirici. In memoriam'. Memory is elusive, it turns to ash and can only be poured out in a blurred form. But it is in the gesture of the hand that traces and paints that the motifs/objects of memory become possible, come alive. The picture, understood as painting and object at the same time, becomes image and magical ritual liturgical object.
Sense títol, work by Àngel Jové. Painting on laid paper, piece of wood with a piece of glass exhibited at the EINA Art Fund in Sentmenat.
A multifaceted artist, Àngel Jové has designed many of the covers and collections of books for the publishing houses Tusquets and Anagrama. He was also the fetish actor of the filmmaker Bigas Luna in Bilbao, Caniche, Angustia, Las edades de Lulu and also in Més enllà de la passió by Jesús Garay.
In the EINA library, you can consult Capiscar la flor de la mà morta, the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition held in 1990 at the Arts Santa Mònica, which is a publication edited by the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya. It was donated by Xavier Olivé.