Art: Sculpture Unlimited

Jōan Junyer is a painter who paints no pictures, a sculptor who carves no stone. He molds abstract shapes of wood and plaster, paints them with wavering, rainbow strokes of cool color, ornaments them with bold patterns, simplified human figures and shadow-casting bumps and cutouts. Result: a new kind of fluid wall decoration which revives, in a modern idiom, the painted-sculpture art of the ancient Egyptians, Syrians and Greeks.

Spanish-born Jōan Junyer used to paint conventional pictures, showed them for ten years running at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie International exhibitions. After Franco took over Spain, Junyer came to the U.S. and earned a new reputation as an innovator. Pictures, he decided, are too limited—because they have to be evenly lighted and looked at headon. So he turned to sculpture-paintings, which are made to fit odd corners as well as flat walls, can be seen from different angles, in changing lights, with an almost unlimited variety of effects. Each angle and light shows a different facet of Junyer’s work.