In memory of Joan Casanovas i Romaguera

Thursday, February 6, 2025

In order to remember him in this fourth anniversary of his passing, the History Museum of Girona has arranged a small display of some of his works at the hall. You can visit it until the beginning of March.

On February, 4th it was the fourth anniversary of the death of Joan Casanovas i Romaguera, artist, designer and cultural activist, son of the town of Arenys de Mar and settled in Girona in 1964. At the city he started a family with Albina Varés i de Batlle, mother of his two daughters, Ariadna and Elisenda.

Alongside Isidre Vicens, Enric Marquès, Maria Crehuet, Bep Marquès, Lluís Carreras, Enric Ansesa and Jaume Faixò, he was one of the promoters of ADAG (Democratic Assembly of Artists of Girona), one of the biggest cultural revulsive of the city. From those times of fight and hope to change the world, he remembered: “We did not have time. It was 1976 and everything was yet to be done.”

Later, settled in Ordis with his partner Maria Crehuet, he extensively devoted himself to art. Soon after, he started his thirty-year career as a graphic designer at the City Hall of Girona, which generated, in words of Anna Capella, unrepeatable editorial lines, abiding museography, logotypes still used nowadays and iconic slogans such as “Girona m’enamora” [Girona makes me fall in love].

He was the one who designed the History Museum of Girona, and one of the main actors in the change of image of the city. He was also one of the devisers of the rediscovery of the Jewry, with the design of the Jewish History Museum and the Institute of Nahmanides Studies.

His last exhibition, Flâneur, organised by the Friends of the Art Museum of Girona in 2020, was, citing Anna Capella’s text, an intense journey through everything that lays between observation and action. A work made always with a good mastery of colour, with a cunning, amusing, witty gaze, with stubbornness and lasting certainties. And thus he drew and projected a Girona of his own, which since then, has become the city of more than a single generation.

The History Museum of Girona preserves, since some months ago, around 60 works by Joan Casanovas, which were given by his daughters, Ariadna and Elisenda. These works keep company to other objects that had already joined the museum’s collection some time ago, also given by his daughters, like the portrait of Carles Rahola that can be seen at the study of this intellectual from Girona, or a phone cabin from the 1960s that illustrates how the communications in the Girona of the previous century used to be.

To remember Joan Casanovas is to evoke the city of colours captured in those greens, yellows and reds so intense that draw the Girona that makes us fall in love, at the same time that project the medieval splendour of the city, a nod to the three Books of Privilege preserved at the municipal archive.