In memory of Joan Costa Solà-Segalés

Last November 24th, the communicologist and designer from Badalona Joan Costa Solà-Segalés (1926-2022) died. Considered one of the world’s leading researchers in communication, signaling, schematics and scientigraphy, alongside personalities such as Gillo Dorfles, Angelo Schwartz, Vilém Flusser, Umberto Eco, Luc Janizevski, Elisabeth Rohmer, Victor Schwach or Abraham Moles, Costa Solà-Segalés also had a brief career as an artist in his youth.

Formed at the Llotja, Costa Solà-Segalés was mainly influenced by Impressionist painting. He exhibited in Barcelona (Saló de Tardor), Badalona and Sant Adrià de Besòs, and was awarded in Sant Adrià and Badalona. He worked mostly in pencil portraiture and painting but, ultimately, it would be in the field of design and communication where he would succeed. He was a professor at the Visual School of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​and is the author of more than twenty books and hundreds of articles on communication, sociology of the image and design.

Two works from that first period in which he became interested in painting and drawing are preserved in the collections of our Museum. The first is the portrait of a cousin of the author, Rosa Motino Solà-Segalés, who was 17 years old at the time. This work, an oil painting, was presented at the local exhibition of Fine Arts in Badalona in 1947 and was awarded the first prize in the category of local authors. In 2020 it was included in the Portraits exhibition that could be seen at the Museum in the spring and summer of that year, right after the months of confinement. The second work, titled Descans, was acquired for 2,000 pesetas by the Badalona City Council, after it was part of the Local Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1951 and was awarded one of the special prizes. Years later, the work would enter the Museum’s Art Fund.

                                                       Portrait of Rosa Motino Solà-Segalés (1947) and Descans (1951)