Exhibitions
Joan Verdú, pop as a playing territory
Life in Dailyland recovers at the Carme Center the irreverent universe of one of the most unique Valencian artists of recent decades, with more than 160 works and three unpublished sets.
Entering Life in Dailyland is entering a world where popular culture, advertising and everyday objects cease to be what they seem to be and become artistic matter. The Carme Center transforms the Sala Carlos Pérez into the imaginary territory of Joan Verdú (Alzira, 1959 – Alginet, 2017), a universe full of billboards, commercial products, windows, characters, objects and signs taken from everyday life. A seemingly familiar landscape that the artist subjected to an ironic, acidic and irreverent gaze.
Verdú defined himself as “son of pop” and “grandson of surrealism”, two genealogies that help to understand a work marked by a fascination with the codes of mass culture and, at the same time, by the will to subvert them. His Dailyland is precisely that: an imaginary place constructed from the images that surround us, but altered, displaced and loaded with new meanings.
The exhibition, curated by Tomás Verdú, brings together more than 160 works and is the largest exhibition dedicated to the artist since his death. The project traces a prolific career in which pop, surrealism, humor and popular culture coexist with a unique symbolism. In addition to recovering some of his best-known series, the exhibition incorporates three sets that had not been presented before: Conills (2013), Los Blues alegres (2002-2003) and Imágenes confusas (2003).
For Verdú, popular culture was not simply a source of inspiration, but the very material with which he constructed much of his language. Advertising, brands, comics, television, cinema, characters and consumer objects appear repeatedly in his works. The artist took these signs, already integrated into the collective imagination, and subjected them to an operation of displacement that questioned their original meaning.
In this process, advertising acquired a new dimension. What had been conceived to sell, seduce or impose a desire became part of a visual game in which humor and irony allowed the mechanisms of consumer society to be highlighted. A large wall conceived almost as a kind of Times Square of Dailyland concentrates a good part of this spirit: an accumulation of images, messages and references that functions at the same time as a showcase, collage and critical artifact.
But Verdú's universe is not limited to parody. In his works there is also a genuine fascination with the images that are part of our daily experience. His artistic gesture consists of looking at them anew, extracting them from their context and forcing them to relate to other elements. It is in this displacement that another possible reading of what we consider familiar appears.
Even the characteristic black holes that appear in many of his works function as gateways to this universe. They are interruptions in a reality saturated with images, spaces open to the unknown that invite the viewer to imagine what might lie beyond. An invitation to cross the surface of Dailyland and discover that, behind the humor, there is a particularly lucid look at the contemporary world.
Life in Dailyland thus recovers the figure of a fundamental artist for understanding the relationship between Valencian contemporary art and pop culture. A fun work, apparently light and full of recognizable references that, under this playful surface, raises a persistent question: what happens when the images we consume every day stop fulfilling the function for which they were created and start looking at us?
The exhibition can be visited at the Carme Center from October 7, 2026 to January 17, 2027.
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