In 2007 Joan Bennàssar and the writer Gabriel Janer Manila created a book of traditional Mallorcan songs of an erotic nature entitled Mallorca Erótica. Janer Manila was responsible for selecting the texts, while Bennàssar provided the more than fifty illustrations.
The idea for this volume arose from the book the writer published in 1979 titled Sexe i Cultura a Mallorca: El Cançoner (Sex and Culture in Mallorca: The Songbook), the result of his search for traditional erotic Mallorcan songs recorded between 1962 and 1977. The text of Mallorca Erótica is a selection of the most entertaining and unusual songs from that first volume.
The paintings made for the book brought erotic themes back into the spotlight in Bennàssar’s artistic output. They are paintings in which love, joy, passion, and feelings are very present through bodies that unite harmoniously. Of these works the art critic Francesc Verdú wrote ‘They show precisely this constant search, this obsession of the artist to capture the feelings we long for, to reclaim beauty and love as the only watchtowers that can protect us from the emptiness that absorbs us more and more each day. Joan Bennàssar’s erotic paintings are a hymn to life, to love. It is worth living to love someone, to love them with all the consequences.’
The book is divided into eight sections, with titles in Spanish and Mallorcan (which is similar to Catalan):
El Pájaro/L’Aucell (The Bird)
La Flor/La Flor (The Flower)
Empuja, Empuja, Floriana/Empeny, Empeny, Floriana (Push, Push, Floriana)
La Jaula Llama al Pájaro/La Gàbia Crida L’Aucell (The Bird is Drawn to the Cage)
Frailes, Rectores, Vicarios y Beatas/Frares, Rectors, Vicaris i Beates
(Friars, Priests, Vicars and Sanctimonious Hypocrites)
Donde hay Pelo hay Alegría/On hi ha Pèl hi ha Alegria
(Where There’s Hair There’s Joy)
Marido, No Estéis Celoso/Marit, No Estigueu Gelós (Husband, Be Not Jealous)
Deseo del Acto Sexual/Desig de L’Acte Sexual (The Desire for Sexual Intercourse)
In the introduction to the book, Maria de la Pau Janer writes:
Books, like oysters hold pearls, one of the most valuable, most magical treasures: the keys to the human condition, to what we were, to what we are, and to what, surely, we will be. All this and more is found in Mallorca Eròtica, a volume in which the most deeply rooted tradition of our land, the sung and narrated voice of our ancestors, of all those men and women whose existence has shaped the Mallorca we all know, blends in intimate harmony with the most absolute modernity, with the reality of 21st-century Mallorca, a modern advanced society at the forefront of Europe, alive and dynamic, yet one that refuses to lose its past, its cultural and collective identity.
This book is an extraordinary tool that helps all of us Mallorcans to root ourselves a little deeper in a past that has survived unchanged for centuries, and that we now have an obligation to protect so that it cannot disappear, because a country without a past is a country without history, dead, devoid of soul. To love, one must know, and to know our roots is to love them. I would like to pay special attention to the magnificent drawings that the Pollença painter Joan Bennàssar has made to accompany these glosses. Bennàssar is one of the great artists we have in this land. Deeply rooted in tradition, sheltered by this ancient culture, he is one of the most distinguished members of the lineage of great artists this land has produced.
Mallorca Eròtica includes a complete English translation of the text, which you can read here.
