2018 CADAQUES MINI PRINT INTERNATIONAL

The Real Museum of Prints
There is a history of complicity between Cadaqués
and the artists, that starts out at the end of the 19th
century and persists for over a century with circumstantial
ups and downs. When Joan Josep Tharrats
wrote his memorable book One Hundred Years of
Painting in Cadaqués, among the 338 artists who at
one time or another passed through this village, he
mentioned the enameller, painter and printmaker
Pascual Fort. “In Cadaqués he opened the Taller
Galería Fort (the Workshop Gallery Fort) where he
exhibited the graphic work of mainly Catalan artists.”
He wrote this in 1981, and that same summer
Pascual Fort guided the Mini Print International of
Cadaqués out of anonymity.
If some day this historic-artistic story of Cadaqués,
which has such powerful names as Pichot, Meifren,
Picasso, Dali, Duchamp or Hamilton, is updated,
the Mini Print competition, which has reached its
38th edition, should have its own chapter next to
other events that have marked this privileged corner
of the Cap de Creus.
The statistics of the Mini Print are impressive. From
the beginning an average of 600 to 700 artists from
more than 50 countries have participated annually.
The sum of the 38 exhibitions raises the number
of participants to 9,700 artists from around the
world. And their work has been examined by a jury
and admired by the public in the Workshop-Gallery,
converted into a veritable museum, on Hort
d’en Sanés street. Spain, the United States and Japan
are the countries that have congregated the
most participants. But in 2018, seven artists from
South Korea, three from Iran, one from Mongolia
and five from New Zealand – to mention only the
most distant – have contributed works. The name
Cadaqués attracts many of these artists and each
one of these becomes a new diffuser of the brand
Cadaqués associated with art. It is a mutual attraction
based on the landscape, on the people, on the
tramontane, on a cultural tradition…
Every year this love story extends to other towns that
exhibit the works: l’Étangd’Art in Bages (France);
Wingfield Barns in Suffolk (United Kingdom);
Tharrats Foundation of Graphic Art, in Pineda
de Mar (Spain). On other occasions the work has
travelled to South Korea, Japan, Italy, Mexico, the
United States… In addition, and fortunately, since
2s016 the prizewinning prints have been deposited
in the Library of Catalonia, and there are now
more than 250 of them. But beyond this numerical
presence, what is interesting about the Mini Print
is that in the future it will permit one to follow and
analyze tendencies in the world of printmaking.
The complexity of thematics, the presence of figuration,
the introduction of the digital world and
the diversity of techniques will be information that
can be extrapolated from these exhibitions. Without
elitist pretensions its catalogs have become a
data base that will permit future studies of artistic
evolution.
And a final element to take into account is that we
face a proposal that can only be explained by the
taste for the exquisite, by the sensitivity and by the
willfulness of the Fort-Barberá family. And thanks
to this the competition has been consolidated and
another milestone achieved by continuing the
project for four decades, not easy in Cadaqués.
Josep Playà Maset, journalist.