The «Mosca» chair
In the eighties and nineties, Belda specialized in furniture and interior design, as well as the design of exhibition spaces. His furniture includes, for example, the Gong, Mosca and Cebra chairs, the Columnas de Trajano bookcase and the Japan armchair, and he also participated in the Valencian Community pavilion of Expo 92.
His outstanding spatial design projects include the work he performed in the shops La Luna and Agua de Limón, in Valencia, and the exhibitions on the IMPIVA awards of 1985 and 1986, on Mariscal in 1988, and on Valencian designers in the IVAM (1994). José Juan Belda was also a professor of interior design and projects at the School of Industrial Design of the CEU, now Universidad Cardenal Herrera CEU, between 1992 and 2000.
With work that set out to break the most conventional design rules, with his Mosca chair he blurred Bauhaus functionalism with a tendency to explore other shapes with a piece of furniture that awakens emotions.
His chair is fun, just like the chairs of the Memphis group, with a naive air that situates it between a seat and a sculpture, in the line of the famous First chair (1983), an acclaimed piece of the Italian group whose name was inspired by a Bob Dylan song (“Stuck inside of mobile with the Memphis blues again”).
During his fifty-year professional career, Belda was greatly influenced by that Memphis style, the most influential proponent of which was Ettore Sottsass, and he managed to connect it to the Spanish design of the eighties and nineties via his attractive creations that sought, above all, to provoke sensations in the onlooker.