Chico Prats, the Painter of Everyday Scenes
The places of childhood shape people’s lives. Ibiza, his mother’s homeland and the setting of Josep Manuel Chico Prats’ childhood summers, is deeply present in his work. Those months of heat and long days allowed him to immortalize the island’s corners through the eyes of someone who truly understood its reality, rather than through the gaze of a simple visitor.
Chico Prats’ canvases are authentic documents of an Ibiza that once existed and still survives amid the noise and lights that dazzle everything around it. Moreover, the artist knew how to find beauty in ordinary scenes and moments. Few painters have managed, as he did, to capture the human activity surrounding the market and the port, or the contrast created by the first tourists strolling among women dressed in traditional peasant clothing on their way to the square carrying their baskets.
He made this entire human landscape the protagonist of his paintings, immortalizing everything from rural labor to a woman drawing water from a well or fetching it from a fountain. He also knew how to portray the splendor of a traditional peasant wedding or a village festival, the atmosphere of conversations from balcony to balcony across a square, or the elegance of people leaving church on an ordinary Sunday or during a religious procession.
Like any true Impressionist, Chico Prats painted what he saw. His merit lies in the fact that he was able to perceive and paint the charm of simple scenes. He was also the painter of the light of the Islands, and of Ibiza in particular — that light illuminating the different whites of the walls, so similar to the light of Valencia that he enjoyed while studying at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts; the blues of the sea he also observed while studying at La Llotja School in Barcelona; and the greens of the countryside.
Baltasar Porcel wrote about him in the collection Contemporary Masters of Catalan Painting and Sculpture: “Chico Prats does not paint the stereotypical white Ibiza. Santiago Rusiñol baptized it as such: the white island. Yet it turns out to be the most wooded of the Balearic Islands […] Ibiza always exudes greenery […] Even in Chico Prats’ whites there are vegetal reflections; the limewash has been softened. Few painters have discovered this intimate structure of the Ibizan landscape…”.
Like many other artists who used photography as support for their work, Chico Prats enjoyed capturing people and moments that later helped him in his compositions. Since 2013, a collection of 3,000 photographs taken by him between the 1950s and the 1980s has enriched the holdings of the Historical Archive of Ibiza and Formentera (AHEiF), thanks to a donation made by his children. Looking at them helps us better understand the eyes through which he viewed everything he considered worthy of being immortalized: life.
Fanny Tur Riera
