"Il libro dell'acqua ".

Pinacoteca de Jesi.
Edizioni Comune de Jesei.
50 pag. 7,00€.

THE BOOK OF WATER
2007

"There is no vessel like a book to be able to carry us Hawai to faraway lanas"
Emily Dickinson

(...) Massana offers us a book not for leafing through, but a book whose pages the reader can enter in search of the code to decipher a captivating yet unusual alphabet, whose rational system of letters and numbers is decontextualized, while waiting for someone to put it back into order and connect up its various elements, in this way revealing a mostly emotional meaning.

Naturally, the book also consists of works on paper, but Massana's philosophy of life, according to which all of life is a book to be studied, drives him not only towards the use of the most diverse materials applied onto the pictorial support, thus making it three-dimensional, but also towards sculptures of different dimensions that go to make up spatial installations in a book that absorbs us as visitors of an exhibition.
In perfect agreement with the title "The Book of Water", which suggests ephemeral, fleeting forms, this time Massana also makes us art that is linked to the concept of time, integrating a video into his compositions.(...)

Julia Draganovic Directora del Palazzo delle Arti Napoli

Il libro dell'acqua (Vanilla Edizioni)
Albissola Marina, 2007.
80 pag. 18,00€

EL LLIBRE DELS ARBRES
2006

Is there any sense, in the end, painting after Tàpies, rooted as we are in full relationism, or was it visual?
There is the fissure of emotional intelligence to float in this deconstruction of the system.
The only way out is to float the undefined subjectivity that is transformed into pulsing, active intense signs. A shortcut.

Josep Miquel García
Fragment from the Llibre dels arbres Galeria Carme Espinet, Barcelona 2006

IL LIBRO DEGLI ALBERI
2006

Massana reaches a distinct type of figuration that explores the visible, that generates it without being based on a model to reproduce, but rather letting it flourish from the experience and from memory, a “theatre of things”, objects, designs, materials known to the artist but no less extraordinary for that. Continually stimulated by forms, colours, sounds, smells, tensions (”do you remember now...”), Massana puts himself into a position adapted to accept epiphanic revelations, emblematic presences of archetypical Valencia, torn out of the black shadow of the memories, gathered together in a new pictorial speciality, and, finally, explained in the pages of this book of the trees.

Chiara Canali
Fragment from the catalogue Il libro degli alberi Galeria il torchio, Costantini-Milan, 2006

LO LLIBRE DELS NÚVOLS
2004

Joanpere Massana searches and delves in nature, in his experiences, in his surroundings; he searches and delves into his memories, to find, once again, the vital sense of existence. That is why his work surprises and pleases. Joanpere Massana brings us closer to that newly-born sense of artistic work, between the apprehension of the world of the primitive man and the urge for commotion of Christian painting.
Massana gives us a different dimension of painting, he gives us a lesson, partly humanistic, partly mystical: he values the world, the surroundings, as a unique parameter to which he holds on –the uncontaminated and newly-born world–.

Francesc Miralles, critic of the exhibition
Fragment from Lo llibre dels núvols Galeria Carme Espinet, barcelona 2004

UN LIBRO PER JANA
2003

Moreover, the author doesn’t make the childish view his own, but rather the heart, the spirit, the soul. Infancy can’t be breathed in these works, it isn’t seen. It can’t be studied, you have to delve into it. Everything appears only momentary, destined not to last long. He has worked to obtain the security of who thinks that nothing must finish, that the sun isn’t obliged to go down. He has found all this in the sign and the gestures of infancy.

Maurizio Sciaccaluga
Fragment from the book Un libro per Jana, Galeria il torchio, Costantini-Milano, 2003

UN LLIBRE PER LA JANA
2003

I would like to invent a book where the words were a furrow in the earth, and a place to plant little drops of colour becomes a breath every time we open the eyes of our heart our eyes.
I would like to explain the world to you with a line and the thoughts with a doodle that stretches out to infinity, passing through materials with forms that never become specific and looks that, when they want to stop, can’t, for the losing themselves on their own way.

Joanpere Massana
Fragment from Un llibre per la Jana, Galeria Collage, Lleida 2003

LO LLIBRE DELS JOCS
2002

As well as the most immediate and fabulist aspect, there is in Massana the pleasure of enumeration, of putting things into order, of placing the elements necessary to reach the knowledge into file. This is the most outstanding modernity skill of the young Catalan. Artist, entomologist, botanist, zoologist, observer of the world. And then, narrator. Because the view over the world is still the first step in the intellective process.

Luca Beatrice
Fragment from the book il libro dei giochi, Milan 2002

These pages are white and, it is necessary to scratch, stain, make their contents well up. What Joanpere now offers us is a plastic tale, like the medieval altarpieces, but where the essential is in the touch, the sensation of a tactile visual nature. This is permitted by contemporary art.

Arnau Puig, philosopher and art critic
Fragment from the book il libro dei giochi, Barcelona-Milan 2002