He studied photography at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and Westminster University in London, and has dedicated a large part of his career to documenting the two passions from his youth: punk music culture and skateboarding. Beyond that, he has also found inspiration and creativity in more thematic and open series. His images are usually in black and white and are full of life experiences, with a good dose of reality whilst always being fully subjective.
The constant search for occultism steeped in Freudian psychoanalytical thought positions Joan Ponç as one of the national greats of the surrealist school. Influenced by his friendship with Josep Vicenç Foix and Joan Brossa, his early paintings reflect a schematic primitivism where anthropomorphic figures coexist with the vegetable, transporting us to a fantasy world of dreams and the subconscious. Ponç was founder of the first avant-garde magazine Algol and the Dau al Set group, together with Modest Cuixart, Antoni Tàpies, Joan Josep Tharrats, Joan Brossa, Arnau Puig and the critic Juan Eduardo Cirlot. In 1965 he was awarded the Grand Prize for Drawing at the 7th Sao Paulo Biennial for his series Suite pájaros.
Espe Pons specializes in reportage and artistic photography and her professional activity is spread between commissions and her personal creation. From a static perspective, her work opens a path to an inner reflection and the evocation of memory based on an almost documentary approach to the places she portrays. Her landscapes and spaces, which rarely include the human figure, exude silence and yet at the same time condense diverse emotions which, from a position of absence, make the human being present. This play on absence–presence is also evident in the artist’s interest in historical memory which has led her, through the use of her camera, to bring events that history had erased to light.
Despite having a special interest in the surroundings, Lisette Pons’s photographs do not keep a documentary distance, but instead seek to bear witness to the artist’s feelings and experiences. In this way, they become a fragment of the memory and of what endures after contact with the world.
The black and white and the process of research in the laboratory give the final result a certain abstraction that adds a highly emotional aspect to the photographs. In a period such as the current one, in which the photographic image is abundant and constantly communicative, the artist offers us some silent photographs that allow us to reflect on human behaviour and existence.
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