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About

Joan Tuset i Suau (born in l’Arboç Tarragona Catalonia 19 December 1957) is an artist, painter, and sculptor.

Career

Joan Tuset i Suau studied fine arts in Tarragona and Barcelona. His first painting exhibition was in 1976 in the city of Tarragona. During the 1980s Tuset moved to Canada, where he lived for six years and exhibited at the Edimage Gallery, Joyce Yahouda Gallery, and the Cultart Gallery. He also showed at the Art Institute of Chicago and the 87 FIAC International Art Fair au Grand Palais of Paris. In 1989, he moved to Paris, where he settled for six months and exhibited at Vison Quai Gallery. These stages were a fundamental change in his life and work, as his figurative compositions gained more force and tension, the characters of his works acquired a more classic basis, and his style was enriched with personal and expressive deformations. When he returned to Catalonia, he settled between L’Arboç, his hometown, and Barcelona.

Painting

His years of pictorial research of the European masters gave him a technical mastery of body and color and a knowledge of space. He works with large monochrome or bichromatic areas that give his work a monumental sensation, with volumes that interact with the light and shadow of his characters, and in some works, light seems to originate from the bottom, and in others, it is used to lighten faces and accentuate them with emotions.

The central theme of Tuset’s work is usually the human figure, its condition, its emotions, its daily environment, the passage of time, and the psychology of art. The key to his inspiration lies in the tension that is generated within the psychological or emotional condition, which is usually the starting point of the processes and materials with which he finally decides to work. More recently, he has introduced in his work more complex and intellectualized reflections about his environment, the things that surround him, his workshop, his spirituality, and his daily life, from which he takes ideas to create his art.

Joan Tuset i Suau talks about connecting to a world allowing him to “express his ideas and thoughts”, and art serving “to express and communicate our innermost feelings, emotions, thoughts and experiences”. Our exchange, the power of art to communicate complex ideas and feelings transpired, by the strong impulse it can provide to the human being, aiming to “create freely and transmit something that can only be understood from the need to think and live as an artist”. Concepts found, as put by Tuset, in the essence of art, as it consists of “learning to see, to be aware that we are here, that we are alive”, and art helps to link our inner world with the outside world.

Sculpture

His sculptures generally represent the human body and its forms are rounded and elegant. Many interpreters compare the undulating shape of their reclining bodies to the landscape of Catalonia. Joan Tuset i Suau usually works in terracotta, plaster, bronze, or resin with marble powder, without giving up other materials that can enrich the final result of his work. In 2005, he was commissioned to create the monument to the “Puntaire de L’Arboç” (typical emblematic figure of Catalonia), a work made in bronze that is located in one of the roundabouts of the National Highway 340, at the entrance of his hometown village, l’Arboç del Penedés (Tarragona), and was inaugurated by Josep Huguet, the Minister of Commerce and Tourism of the Government of the Generalitat de Catalunya in that time.