Paisatge. La Costa Brava (Landscapes. The Costa Brava)

Self-taught Catalan artist Joan Massanet, a pharmacist by profession, approached painting by way of avant-garde magazines such as Minotaure, L’Amic de les Arts and Cahiers d’Art, and through his friendship with the critic Sebastià Gasch, the gallerist Josep Dalmau and, above all, his fellow Catalan artist Salvador Dalí. From 1927 onwards, and throughout almost the entirety of his career, the influence of Dalí was pivotal in his work. Paisatge. La Costa Brava (Landscapes. The Costa Brava), an enigmatic and unsettling work, is part of his peak Surrealist output, in which the vocabulary of his clear affiliation with Dalí is at the fore, drawing from his use of multiple images and an architecture of soft, fluid, viscous forms embedded in a desolate landscape, and with recognisable fragments of the unusual landscape of L’Escala, the Alt Empordà town he lived in for the majority of his life.



Raúl Martínez Arranz