Some years ago, as many as 40 now, in a relative's garden, Joan Rovira was drawn to a sound. Pruning shears were cutting excessively grown bamboo canes. In that sound, as the bamboo broke, Joan perceived the natural consistency of this material. He thought that wood, very dense, would go well with the tools he used in his jewelry workshop, and he took some canes to let them dry, still without a clear idea of what creative form he could model with them.
One day, in class ---he was studying at Escola Massana then---, very bored during Art History, he started thinking about that bamboo drying at home, and began compulsively drawing shapes, figures, lines in his notebook to model that bamboo. It was the eighties, and the brooch ---or breastpin---, in contemporary jewelry was the piece par excellence; earrings were not yet, explains Rovira.
With his bamboo canes in mind, he designed an original brooch that would end up traveling through Europe in a jewelry exhibition. A professor proposed to him and some classmates to participate in a selection of creations that in Christmas 1985 would go on tour to Holland and Germany. Thus, from that garden where canes were abundant, a piece of that bamboo conquered a place in an international jewelry catalog. Passing through the artist's hands.
Bamboo is an invasive species, which arrived from America, with the Indianos. It can be found in many places in Catalonia, such as around Montseny. Joan knows where to look for it, and also where to acquire it, from a more distant origin. Now, he and bamboo are intimate friends, maintaining a relationship based on what each can contribute to the other.
In 1984 ---he explains---, "bamboo presented itself to me as a noble material. And each of its characteristics ---hardness, lightness, resistance, flexibility, durability, harmony, sustainability--- I have been discovering with patience and dedication." But, after finishing his training in Applied Arts with a specialization in jewelry at Massana, Joan opened a long parenthesis in his dedication to art. A multinational and many trips with it kept him completely away from creativity, until one morning, after many years, he woke up and said to himself: "I am a jeweler."
He was already 50 years old, but age was not an impediment to getting back to it and drawing jewelry models again. And now, surely, he could affirm that saying that assures that, "if you know how to choose well what you want to dedicate yourself to, you will never have to work again."
With his wife, Cinta Justribó, he looked for a place that would be both a workshop and a shop, and he found it where they wanted, in the artisans' quarter, El Born. At number 10 Cotoners Street, on the corner with Esquirol Street, is where each new creation by this artist sees the light. His workspace is his oasis, his refuge, where music plays a fundamental role, inspiring, company and atmosphere, where Joan merges with everything he does. If it weren't for his wife reminding him when it's time to close, he still wouldn't leave. Because he maintains an intense dialogue with any small material he holds in his hands.
Around 2010, he uploaded photographs of the brooch from his first exhibition and other jewelry from the eighties to his website. A few days later, he received a call from a man who noticed one of the pieces and wanted to buy it. But Joan had not put the measurements, and that man had gotten the idea that what he liked measured ten times more than the 20 centimeters it actually measured. However, the man asked the jeweler if he would make a similar structure, but of large dimensions, reaching two meters. And Joan said yes.
Taking on that challenge, which he admits took him quite a while to complete, Joan began a new creative dimension: mobile sculptures. Suspended in the air, because only very fine and discreet threads keep them hanging from the ceiling, they are, for now, an inexhaustible source of creation for the artist, who never stopped being one. "Now I feel able to transfer any piece that comes to mind to the workshop," he confesses. "Sometimes, it's the clientele that gives you the starting signal," he says. All the internal demand that a challenge entails makes him come out stronger, therefore, he considers it an investment.
"I started working with bamboo 40 years ago, and I suspect this is not over"A pesar de que siempre su trayectoria creativa se ha centrado mayoritariamente en la joyería, en los últimos tiempos está cambiando el formato de joya por estos volúmenes más grandes que decoran los espacios, llenándolos sin llenarlos: "In mobile sculptures is where I have more freedom to enhance the characteristics of bamboo."Additionally, he says, on an artistic level, "it gives me much more freedom than jewelry, because, depending on the piece, it cannot weigh too much, and a large structure gives me a lot of freedom of inspiration."
Until October 25, at the main entrance of Clínica Teknon, an exhibition of his three-dimensional works made with bamboo can be seen. He presents them as Dialogues, dances and silences, because that is all he has done with bamboo, a joint dance, a conversation on the way to a concrete creation, a form of expression of the material and the artist, bringing out the potential of both.
"I started working with bamboo 40 years ago, and I suspect this is not over," he expresses. "Every week, I cut and polish it, I research it and play with it, and almost every week it teaches me new things." Furthermore, he explains, "there is that magical addition: I can go look for it in the forests of Sant Celoni and Gualba, I can do the whole process, from the point of birth of the bamboo until I put it in a final piece, and all this is very experiential. It's not the same as going to the fine arts store and buying colors. I see the environment of the bamboo, where it grows and how it grows. Now that it has rained, I already want to go look for it again. Since it is an invasive species, there is more and more of it. And since bamboo has these qualities of solidity, lightness, and sustainability, it also has many messages within it. It's as if each time I discovered a new song."
Creative capacities
On Thursday afternoons, at a cultural center of the Mollet del Vallès City Council, Joan Rovira teaches a jewelry creation workshop. It is a space of freedom where ideas materialize. Most of the students are women, "as usually happens in yoga classes, painting, or book clubs. Women tend to have more concerns, are more curious and entrepreneurial," he specifies. Also in official jewelry studies, 95% of the students ---he says--- are women. In his workshops, every challenge achieved by a student is a shared satisfaction. In the attic of his store, where he has his workshop, he often receives jewelry students who come to do internships and learn from Joan's experience.
Reflecting on creativity and inspiration, he explains that, over time, he has realized that "creativity, if you don't feed it, eats you." And he explains: "Creativity is a talent for which we have no merit, you don't go looking for it, you have it inside, just as you have a gift, and it turns against you when you don't use it. For it to take shape, you have to accompany it, listen to it, interpret it, understand it... And many factors, external and internal, intervene in the creative process."
Joan Rovira's unique shop and creative space is in the heart of the neighborhood where the narrow streets preserve the artisanal essence of what the Born once was, with the activity of the guilds that we read in the names of its streets, such as Cotoners, where he, with his activity, also guards this authenticity. Now, he comments, "we are at a propitious moment for creativity and craftsmanship, because in the technological, global world, that of franchises that make you find the same stores all over the world, the great beneficiary is craftsmanship. It is the refuge, a creative oasis, singular, authentic and with a unique and own personality, which many seek and will always seek."