When Rene de Costa introduced Joan Brossa and Nicanor Parra to each other at a reception in Madrid, he expected something to happen. An embrace, an argument, some name calling, maybe some flattery. Something. De Costa, a professor of Romance languages and literature at the University of Chicago, and his colleague Sonia Mattalia were hosting a party to launch an exhibition of the two men’s work. This was the first time Brossa, who’s from Barcelona, and Parra, who’s from Santiago, Chile, had been together in a show, but de Costa, who had long studied them, could not imagine them apart. Indeed the similarity between their works was startling; something like the coincidences in the lives of identical twins separated at birth, the ones who both become engineers and marry people with the same name.
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Brossa and Parra are both poets as well as artists. They both work in styles distinctly different from those of their local peers. And though they had never met and had never laid eyes on each other’s creations, they produced bodies of work that are remarkably similar, in some cases interchangeable. Yet de Costa says that when these two wonderfully funny and challenging artists finally met, nothing much occurred beyond polite handshakes and “How do you dos.” If anything the two men avoided each other, fearful perhaps that someone might think they were collaborating.
Brossa’s and Parra’s approach seems to lend itself particularly well to certain themes. Each has returned repeatedly over his long career to the same territory. De Costa and Mattalia list the themes: “the upheaval of ideologies, the transitory quality of consumer society, the ineffable quality of individual association in daily reality.”
In another coincidence that might have ruffled the artists, the exhibition offers almost identical jokes that play on the name of Karl Marx and mar, the Spanish and Catalan word for “sea.” Brossa took a volume of Marx and renamed it Oda a Marx (“Ode to the Sea”), and Parra labeled another volume Los rollos del Mar(x) (“The Dead Sea Scrolls”), both playing on the moribund dreams of communism, both reaching for powerful ideas through visual and linguistic wit.
