BIOGRAPHY
Josep Icart i Espallargas, was born in Pla de la Seu de Tarragona on July 19, 1928. Since childhood he shows a great predilection for painting and drawing. Icart was one of these artists from Tarragona who received his training at the Escola-Taller d’Art de la Diputació, where years later he also became a teacher, as did his partner Tomás Olivar.
When he was only 15 years old in 1943 he obtained a scholarship from the Diputació. In his beginnings he dedicated himself mainly to decoration and restoration, for which there was a great demand, as a result of the destruction caused by the war. He traveled on different occasions in order to get to know the past and present heritage, although he never had a fixed and concrete predilection. He won several medals in competitions and always stood out for his immovable personality that accompanied him all his life.
He finally died in 1985, when he was about to inaugurate the Tarragona Cultural Embassy in Barcelona, an exhibition of drawings and poems that would be a tribute to the artist.
Style
In his beginnings, Icart was already a genius in the mastery of drawing and compositional technique, moreover, he had a six sense of color, but he was skilled in execution, characterized by his unimposing, intense brushstrokes that denoted a certain influence of the Catalan postimpressionist masters. However, he was moving away from the formal and pure and sometimes misleading concept to decline towards apparently abstract compositions. In this sense, he configured a personal language «unique in the line of his time», which made it impossible for his creativity to be accepted in Tarragona, where the institutions and the people were still educated under portrait artistic paradigms that demanded works like those of the past.
The third stage, contextualized in the seventies, is «rebellious, fossilized and turmented. Orogenic forms, like agitated rocks, with a convulsive rhythm». But, in the last years he abandons the black and the aggressive contrasts to give way to «a sinuous and autonomous line, which develops in space horizontally and in a more and more mechanical, automatic way, instinctive, with an absolute freedom». Now light and color are becoming more and more cabdals, their intensity makes them bloom as if a symphony of pastel shades were enveloping the frame, bringing the spectator closer to the mysticism of infinity.
Awards
1954: Second prize at the XII National Art Exhibition in San Sebastián.
1955: He wins the first prize at the Provincial Art Exhibition of Tarragona and a scholarship for further studies in Madrid.
1956: Rep the bronze medal of National Painting
1959: Award of the National Exhibition of Art of San Sebastián
1974: Obtained the XX Medal Tapiró d’Or of the IV Biennial of the Diputació of Tarragona
1981: honorary mention at the XXIII Tapiró Medal of Painting
“An internalized, pure and authentic work, of unquestionable quality and relevance, of which we bring to light in this exhibition a very significant selection with the intention of paying a deserved tribute to such extraordinary fidelity to art and to the land”
Medina de Vargas, R. »Josep Icart (1928-1985)”
Tarragona, Diputació de Tarragona: 2005 p.19