Once upon a time, some ics

Be wary of exhibitions that only deal with one theme. 'The art of the ics. Arts and writings of the eighties and nineties in the Joaquim Pibernat collection' touches on at least four.

Namely: the figure of the "anarchist banker" Joaquim Pibernat (Barcelona, 1952-2022), a recently deceased self-taught scholar who earned his living working at La Caixa, an accumulator of exquisite poetry editions, a promoter of magazines and a collector of "lived" contemporary art. For him, culture was collective alchemy, so he allocated his funds to the Josep Palau i Fabre Foundation, in Caldes d'Estrac.

We also have the two magazines that he helped to found, with Vicenç Altaió and a then young Manel Guerrero . That is, Àrtics (1985-1990), a multilingual magazine that in itself was a work of art and design, an object that could define an era. And Cave Canis (1995-1999), a container magazine with texts and works of art in a boîte-en-valise mode. Both the one, with a circulation of seven thousand copies on newsstands, and the other, with only five hundred copies and which was sold in person at an almost symbolic price, transformed the appearance of each issue into a festive event.

I don't know how we will explain to the new generations the "magazine" genre and its importance in the art world. Magazines brought together communities of interest, served to link people separated in space, to discover worlds out of reach, to recreate and regenerate, to straighten the pulse of lazy times and, of course, as dynamizers of transversal creativity. Spending some time savoring the typographies of arctic, its graphic design, the overlapping dialogues between international artists of the second avant-garde and the emerging generations of artists who are today patum is like traveling in time.

Finally, the exhibition unfolds an era, the Barcelona of the eighties and nineties of the last century, when poetry, plastic arts, performing arts, music, leisure... were a phenomenon emerged and sustained by adventurers and traffickers. A universe truncated today by the institutionalization of culture and neoliberalism.

Right now, at Todocolección.com, an entire collection of Cave Canis is being offered, with its originals by Tàpies and Perejaume, among others, for just 950 euros. This price explains what has changed during the intermission.