Joan Perucho spoke of the art of closing one's eyes apropos of the work of the German artist, Wols, in one of his articles in La cultura y el mundo visual [Culture and the Visual World] (1968). In this piece, Perucho synthesises two essential concerns of the painter's work throughout the 1950s and 1960s. First, he attributes to Wols the desire to return to one's origins, to the physical roots of land and landscape. He writes, "Wols marvels as he contemplates the earth slipping through his fingers, an insect, a drop of water". Again, he says, "As Wols himself wrote, Une petite feuille peut contenir le monde". According to Perucho, Wols was seeking the prehistory of what is visible, going to the root of events, to the eternity contained in all the things in the world. As in the cases of Antoni Gaudí and Joan Miró, the departure point is to be found in observation of nature. All three artists explore a primordial universe going back to ancestral origins and childhood. Starting out from a specific, figurative reference, they invent abstract forms that contain, latent, the mystery of life.

However, in Wols' case, this is just a first step. In Perucho's eyes, his delicate, evanescent watercolours are transformed into something abominable, into wounds and viscera. Evil, death, destruction and remorse become customary themes in the midst of abstract forms. "All this is monstrous", writes Perucho. "Everything that is too alive is pure monstrosity and culture has always been an attempt to veil the heightened monstrosity of what is alive". Later, he comes back to the theme with equal vehemence: "Wols' disenchantment has a metaphysical character and thus he resorts to magma, pantheism, chaos and booze. His art, like his life, tends to destruction."

Wols' art, then, is split. On the one hand it goes back to everyday wonder, to the paradise of childhood, to an out-of-time space to be contemplated in broad daylight. Behind this luminous world there is a bottomless sea of suffering, anxiety and the destruction to which things are subjected by time. The same duality is present in Perucho's early books. In contrast with the existentialism of Sota la sang [Under the Blood] (1947), Aurora per vosaltres [Dawn for You] (1951) is a song of timid hope. In contrast with the biographical evocation of Diana i la mar Morta [Diana and the Dead Sea] (1953) is the occultist crepitation, the esotericism of El mèdium [The Medium] (1954).

The two books that seem to have most influenced Perucho in taking the step from poetry to prose also represent these two features: Helena y el mar del verano [Helena and the Summer Sea] by Julián Ayesta (with its clear imprint on Diana i la mar Morta, even in the title), and La couleur tombée du ciel [The Colour out of Space] by H. P. Lovecraft, which inspired his first short story, Amb la tècnica de Lovecraft [With the Technique of Lovecraft] (1956). Ayesta's book, written with great sensitivity, deals with the end of childhood and loss of innocence, while Lovecraft's is an allegory on a sidereal presence, a colour coming down from the sky, a curse that turns the earth barren.

As an art critic, Perucho is interested in artists who, starting out from the organic, create a solar universe (Gaudí, Miró, Moisès Villèlia). "If there is any one name that is closely linked with the physical root of a land or a landscape it is unquestionably that of Joan Miró", he states at the beginning of his essay Joan Miró i Catalunya [Joan Miró and Catalonia] (1968). He then goes on to identify Miró's creative process with an awareness of the pre-rational and the biological, alluding once again to the monstrosity of that which is too alive: "Miró strives reflexively to get to the bottom of what is ancestral and lost in the nebula of time", so that his art calls up the powers of things created, of death, and sex, "the instinct darkly flailing about since the world began".

The diabolical, the mysterious, the obscure and the unfathomable attract Perucho too. Many of his articles in Destino end with evocations of strange presences and phosphorescent lights. It is not only when he writes of the painting of Joan Ponç or Antoni Tàpies or the sculpture of Salvador Aulèstia – in which case he is fully justified – but also when he is referring to Salvador Dalí ("A mysterious veil sometimes covers our eyes. Then something phosphorescent cautiously slips into the shadow"), or the sculptures of Marcel Martí ("...they present themselves as dark forces of nature, battling to materialise in their jittery resolve to be").

Perucho dedicates poems and prose pieces to Miró, along with several articles in Destino and an essay in the collection "Biblioteca de Arte Hispánico" of the publishing house Polígrafa. He and Miró jointly published two books on the latter (Àlbum 19 [Album 19] and Les essències de la terra [Essences of the Land]). His friendship with the artists of the Dau al Set group was equally intense, especially with Modest Cuixart and Joan Ponç (Perucho's first article on his painting being published in Ariel in 1945). Perucho's relationship with Ponç – just as it was with Cirlot or Palau i Fabre – was complex. He was attracted by the artist's personality, they shared experiences and exchanged letters but, starting from a certain prudent moment, they parted ways.

Perucho identified with Ponç's tormented abysmal universe, with Cuixart's aestheticism and Tàpies' vehemence. In these times of magic-tinged painting there is a patent affinity that makes an appearance when one compares some of the poems of El mèdium ("Les figures de cera" [Wax Figures] or "L'àngel del senyor" [The Angel of the Lord]) with L'escarnidor de diademes [The Mocker of Diadems], or with the painting by Joan Ponç that has pride of place in Perucho's library (a diamond-shaped mirror in which the faces of Tàpies and Cuixart appear in the background). Beyond the period of this magic-tinged painting, Perucho kept interpreting the work of the Dau al Set artists on the basis of the singularity of his own literary universe. As a judge, he sometimes witnessed exhumations. Telling the story of these exhumations is one of the rituals that shape Perucho's world: the rural cemetery, the forensic surgeon putting on rubber gloves (two pairs, one on top of the other), the comments on the frightening cadaverine, a substance that if accidentally injected (a splinter or coffin nail) causes swift death. The old hands recommend not wearing any kind of cologne ("afterwards, every time you use it again, the smell of the corpse comes back by association"). The blotches of colour, product of the explosions of body liquids against the wood, the pieces of textile decomposed on the body of the deceased and strange scratch marks on the lid of the coffin...

One can imagine the impression that such images made on Perucho, who liked to interpret them as a prefiguration of informalist, or abstract expressionist painting. Two of his most important essays in El arte en las artes [Art in the Arts] echo this theme: "Tàpies, degradació i sofriment" [Tàpies, Degradation and Suffering] and "Modest Cuixart y la heráldica de la muerte" [Modest Cuixart and the Heraldry of Death]. Tàpies' superiority vis-à-vis the other artists of "Art Autre" is because Tàpies seeks maximum transcendence ("the material suppurated something resembling the memory of delicate lacework, putrid now with sin and despair, caressed by the viscous fluids of Death").

The tragic and mysterious dimension of informalism is also present in Cuixart, in his macabre sensuality and furious baroquism. Perucho takes part in the debate on this abstract expressionist painting with his own voice. He connects with those who see in its forms an existential metaphysics but rejects the theoretical framework to entrust the whole thing to the specific reference. For Perucho, this abstract expressionist art speaks of the imminence of death, of putrefying bodies, of the passage of time.

Childhood, the palpitation of the past, light, darkness, El país de les meravelles [Wonderland] and El mèdium coexist in Joan Perucho's world. What does this art of closing one's eyes, of which he spoke in his article devoted to Wols, consist of then? The art of closing one's eyes, at this point, is related with the dark forces of nature. It means opening oneself up to another way of seeing, which connects what is happening within the being with the deepest and most ancient forces of creation. It is submerging oneself in a world in formation, feeling the "nostalgic longing for the primordial moment in which man removes the hand of chaos with an organic shudder, which is akin to a continuation of the same shudder of chaos". The artist and poet are guided by a superior instinct in their actions. Perucho emphatically propounds this in the text on Joan Ponç in Ariel. "The artist discovers extremely subtle affinities, invisible bonds in the magic reality of things, relations that one cannot explain but that are still lived as a devouring enigma. There appears, then, the function of the seer."

As the years go by, Perucho was to develop another, much more pliant, conception of literature. His experience as a fiction writer and his work as a journalist have much bearing on this. In 1956 he published his first story, Amb la tècnica de Lovecraft. One year later his first novel, Llibre de cavalleries [Book of Chivalries] was published. At this time Perucho was championing the lyrical novel, now in a programmatic text, on Jordi Sarsanedas, in Cita de narradors [Rendezvous of Narrators].

As a prose writer, he touches on some of the themes of his poetry (the passing of time, the journey to the past, spectres, the quest for spiritual values), although with a freer approach. In Les històries naturals [Natural History] (1960) and the stories he titled Històries apòcrifes [Apocryphal Tales] the role of poetry fades into the background. Perucho links up with the great tradition of the European novel: the journey in quest of identity, relativism and humour.

Again, in relation with the artists to whom he feels closest, Perucho uses the ambiguity of the poem to evoke their work. However, when he speaks of photography, architecture, jewellery, graphic design, comic strips and children's drawings – themes he was the first to introduce into art criticism in Barcelona – his sensibility is of another, more journalistic ilk. Perucho popularises, participates in the debates of the day, upholds refined, aesthetic art in the face of social and political commitment, expresses the desire of modern man to be singular in mass society, creating spaces and entering into imaginary worlds.

In poetry and his writings on the painting of Miró and the Dau al Set group, there were no imaginary worlds: there were presences. Benign presences that take us back to childhood or others that are diabolical because they stir up the enigma of identity. They are phantoms that represent desire or remorse, purity or guilt. In Perucho's stories or articles on design or photography there are no presences but ambiences. And what ambiences they are! This is the moment of the exquisite Perucho, the one fascinated by decadentism and fin de siècle. In the poems of El mèdium and the prose poems of Diana i la mar Morta, his descriptions of places convey the sombre climate of the post-war years: the stark, shabby room in which séance of the poem "El mèdium" is held, the cheap restaurant of the poem "El país de les meravelles", the humble bars (the Sport Bar in La Granadella), walks through the country, after lunch, smoking a fària cigar. With the step from poetry to prose great backdrops appear: the Palais des Papes (Papal Palace) in Avignon, at the beginning of Llibre de cavalleries, the palace of the Marquis de la Gralla in Les històries naturals, and the most famous spas of Europe in Els balnearis [The Spas].

Each setting serves as the point of departure for an invention, a possible happening, an adventure with real or imaginary characters who eat, love, travel, devote themselves to studying the most erudite matters, and fight a duel for the sake of honour or the fatherland.

Perucho changes Lovecraft for Huysmans, the morbid attraction to death for love of the artifice, and eschatology for a certain dandyism. There is a refined, exquisite and spiritual component that is overlaid with a mundane touch, even a desire to be in step with the times so as to oppose the politicised art that is quite impermeable to the changes that are occurring in customs. Taking the side of the most diverse trends that propose a sumptuous and refined art, Perucho justified his literature. The articles he wrote on pop art, jewellery, comic strips, eroticism (La sonrisa de Eros [The Smile of Eros]) clearly reflect his desire to be up to date. Moreover, there is his work as literary director of the Editorial Taber, which introduced the fantastic, gothic and melodramatic novel, the comic, and gastronomic literature. In this context, Perucho saw in the decorative style of pop, influenced by neo-liberty and Carnaby Street (with the decorator Gervasi Gallardo, the illustrators Antoni Morillas and Joan Pedragosa as its main exponents), an opportunity to recover fin de siècle sensibility and milieus.

In this second phase of Perucho's literature, the art of closing one's eyes has another meaning. It means undertaking a journey in time to another moment of history, to another dimension of the present. The clearest example may be found in the opening words of Llibre de cavalleria where the main character Tomàs Safont, evolves into his medieval alter ego (the knight Tomàs Çafont in the service of the King of Aragon) and undertakes a journey back to the times of the Catalan empire in the Mediterranean. The apparent cause of the transformation is a lizard bite and, (according to Cirlot, the lizard symbolises instinct). It is 1957. Safont is standing before the Papal Palace. The sight of the palace (and I have found among the Perucho family papers a postcard of the Palais des Papes dating from this time) sets him off imagining his love for Blanca de Salona and her journey through Alexandria, Ulm and the Kingdom of Threefold Virtue.

At this time Perucho is also a passionate bibliophile, a collector of furniture and ceramics that he acquires from junk shops in Alcanyis, Calaceit and Ronda. When he talks about his passion for old books he likes to make it clear that the function of a book as a collector's item is not so much to be read (a modern edition is more comfortable and manageable) as its favouring the shift to another dimension of consciousness. He says that, on Saturdays, when his wife and children go out, he stays at home, pours a couple of fingers of whisky and takes a volume out of his library, for example a first edition of Góngora. He then has the sensation that this book has been in the hands of its author, that time has contracted and that communication through the centuries is possible.

The possibility of this communion with the great figures of the past has been one of the driving forces of Perucho's novels and stories. Many writers who feature in his library appear in his books next to completely fictitious characters. He has scholars like Menéndez Pelayo or Antoni de Capmany, inventors like Narcís Monturiol, military men like general Palanca, strange writers like Celestino Barallat, author of Principios de Botánica Funeraria [Principles of Funerary Botany], father Tomàs Vicens Tosca, inventor of oblique architecture, the gourmet Manuel Pardo de Figueroa, or the bizarre doctor Thebussem (anagram of "embustes" (hoaxes). All of them are writers. Perucho recounts their diffuse stock of anecdotes, reveals their passions and weaknesses, and speaks of them in a confidential tone, as if they were old acquaintances.

There is a third phase in the life and work of Perucho and a further manifestation of the art of closing one's eyes. It is marked, I think, by two parallel facts: the discovery of the liturgy of culture and the religious experience that presided over his final years. Throughout the decade of the 1970s, Perucho's prestige as an erudite writer consolidated. He was invited to join several academic institutions. His old relationship with Eugeni d'Ors opened the doors of the Acadèmia del Far de Sant Cristòfol (Academy of the St Christopher Lighthouse). The Libro de la cocina española [Book of Spanish Cooking], which he wrote with Néstor Luján, led to his becoming a member of the Academia Española de Gastronomía (Spanish Academy of Gastronomy) and the Acadèmia Catalana de Gastronomia (Catalan Academy of Gastronomy). In 1976 he joined the ranks of the Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona (Royal Academy of Belles Lettres of Barcelona). His inaugural speech, on "Zoologia fantàstica a la Catalunya de la Il·lustració" [Fantastic Zoology of Enlightenment Catalonia] is a disconcerting piece from the standpoint of a scientific institution and a delight of literature of the imagination. Perucho is an atypical academician with regard to the themes he deals with and the freedom with which he manages quotes and texts, and also passionately enthusiastic about ceremony. Nevertheless, when he was offered the chance to join the Royal Spanish Academy, after being proposed by Lázaro Carreter, Martí de Riquer and Pere Gimferrer, he declined.

This passion extends to all aspects of life: ritual, academic and scientific, magic, gastronomic and literary, all of which are fundamental elements in the transmission of culture from past centuries. A good part of the work he wrote after the seventies indulges his taste for the ceremonial, with books parodying natural history (Botànica oculta [Occult Botany]), erudite repertoires (Monstruari fantàstic [Fantastic Freak Show]), or vindicating the nineteenth-century epistolary style (Pamela), or glosses in the style of Eugeni d'Ors (Un dietari apòcrif d'Octavi de Romeu [An Apocryphal Diary of Octavi de Romeu]), biographical literature, for example recovering the figure of James Boswell in Els emperadors d'Abissínia [The Emperors of Abyssinia], and even epigrams (Inscripcions, làpides i esteles [Inscriptions, Tombstones and Steles]), and the lives of saints (Els pares del desert [The Desert Fathers]).

The other fundamental aspect of this period was the religious experience, which became very intense after he turned sixty. At the end of his life, Perucho defined himself as an Apostolic and Roman Catholic. He had always been a believer. Yet it was not until the early 1980s that religious elements had a significant presence in his literary work. In Les aventures del cavaller Kosmas [Adventures of the Knight Kosmas] (1981) and Pamela (1983) his concern for transcendence, always present in his books, turns into a religious adventure. Kosmas is a tax collector of the Byzantine Empire, a theology enthusiast who attends the Council of Toledo and engages in conversation with Saint Isidore and Simeon Stylites. Pamela, a spy who after frequenting Masonic lodges and having been the lover of the Marquis de Sade, converts to Catholicism out of pure love for Ignasi Siurana.

Perucho concerns himself with Eastern rites in Itineraris d'Orient [Eastern Itineraries] and Un viatge amb espectres [A Journey with Spectres] and the atmospheres of Alexandria, Armenia, Athens, old Cairo and Coptic ritual. Later on he introduces popular piety into his work with the saints of Barcelona (El baró de Maldà i les bèsties de l'infern [The Baron of Maldà and the Beasts of Hell]), the primitive poetry of the Lausiac History and the first Christians (Els pares del desert).

Like Huysmans or Aubrey Beardsley, Perucho underwent a sort of "conversion" that went beyond a fascination for religious ritual, the recovery of the piety of his parents and faith of his childhood. It is a change of attitude towards all the things in the world. Literature is translated into a choice of aesthetic models going against the tide, far from the fads and commercial values that have invaded the publishing world. This is how one must understand his fervid vindication of Rafael Sánchez Mazas' novel Rosa Krüger, his vigorous defence of authors like Manuel Brunet, Josep M. Junoy or Joan Baptista Solervicencs, who were stigmatised for ideological reasons, and his defence of proscribed books such as Josep Pla's Història de la Segona República Espanyola [History of the Second Spanish Republic] or Ramon d'Abadal's Tradición y revolución [Tradition and Revolution], in which Perucho examines an attempt at historical sleight of hand. Perucho, who as a young man had shown his devotion for, among other modern writers, Vicente Aleixandre and Juan Larrea, now recognises that he is a follower of Eugeni d'Ors and Sánchez Mazas. As for ancient literature, Latin poetry now occupies the place of the romantics and symbolists. The transformation affects his artistic tastes. Perucho takes a distance from contemporary art. In Els miralls [The Mirrors] (1986) he recovers the artists who had interested him in his youth when he was writing in Alerta: Pidelaserra, Calsina, Rogent, Martín, and the impressionists. Like Mario Praz in Perseu i la medusa [Perseus and the Medusa], Perucho considers that the ugliness of contemporary art is an obstacle and banishes it from his universe.

Perucho takes on the cause and memory of an architecture that is disappearing, swamped by politicised urban planning (his poem dedicated to "La Placeta dels Àngels") and speaks out in memory of great writers fallen into neglect, for example Capmany or Aribau (El baró de Maldà i les bèsties de l'infern), so as to clarify their intervention in some post-war cultural events (apropos of Foix in L'Arc de Sant Martí [The Rainbow] or, more recently, the milieu of Cirlot and his correspondence).

Many of his last articles reconstruct his life's itinerary, from childhood in the Barcelona neighbourhood of Gràcia through to his final years and feature friends of his youth (Nani Valls, Àlvaro Cunqueiro, Cirlot himself), mentor figures from school days (like Sor Sant Miquel), the landscapes of the times when he was working as a judge (Banyoles, La Granadella, Móra d'Ebre, Calaceit, Alcanyís, Horta de Sant Joan) and his journeys to the Near East, to China, Scandinavia or the United States. This whole life runs its course under the protective gaze of the saints, who watch over him from birth till death. If he closes his eyes, this is what he sees: the faces of saints, the faces and hands of his dead. Now, Joan Perucho was writing a book that would be published posthumously and its title was precisely this, Els morts [The Dead]. It is an extensive book of more than a hundred poems with the protective presences of people he has known and who are no longer here.

Few Catalan authors of the twentieth century have been able to offer the diversity of interests and the variety of literature that Perucho has produced, with such a close relationship with the art of his times, such a fecund creation of imaginary worlds and the unrenounceable need to keep alive the memory of people and places he has known, to incorporate them into the cultural tradition alongside books and works of art. El món de Joan Perucho: l'art de tancar els ulls [The World of Joan Perucho: The Art of Closing One's Eyes] offers a journey through his work on the basis of his personal mementos and objects, the settings and characters of his novels and stories, with pieces from a very wide range of collections. Some of these collections – such as the menus of doctor Thebussem of the Biblioteca del Museu Víctor Balaguer de Vilanova i la Geltrú (Library of the Víctor Balaguer Museum of Vilanova i la Geltrú) – have been the source of inspiration of some of his books. Others connect secretly with his literature. The exhibition and the book aim to help situate Perucho's intellectual adventure and offer a reading of post-war Catalan culture from the singularity of its references. It also aspires to bring Perucho back to his readers and to make him known to those who don't yet know him. In this regard it is also hoped that we can remain true to good taste and mystery, to a conception of art and literature as the spiritual fact that Perucho championed throughout his career, against all forms of materialism.

Copyright © 1998 Julià Guillamon and KRTU. Reproduced with the author's permission.