Co-founder of the magazine Algol and the group Dau al Set, Joan Ponç (Barcelona, 1927 – Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 1984) was one of the most unorthodox and unclassifiable Spanish artists of the mid to late 20th century. He began working within the context of artistic currents that reinterpreted magic surrealism during the late forties, but the artist added his own particular imagery to the mix, riddled with demonic and unsettling characters. He lived in Brazil from 1953 to 1964 where he established an art school and heightened the dreamlike quality of his paintings, bringing in numerous figurative elements as well as organic and vegetative motifs. After returning to Catalonia, he spent the sixties and seventies consolidating his own fantastical universe to which he began to add various comic-inspired iconographies. During his final period, spanning the years 1978 to 1984, he explored drawing in greater depth as a way of instantly capturing what he described as ‘uncapturable’. He also completed his most ambitious project: known as Cajas secretas, it consists of 424 pieces arranged into nine series that confirm his main thematic obsessions in which eroticism, dreams and the infernal play a prominent role.