WORLD DESIGN SPOTLIGHT: The «Mosca» chair

La Nave is now a true legend in the history of Valencian design. The group of creators who formed La Nave included several National Design Award winners (Nebot, Gallén, Lavernia, Bascuñán …) and generated numerous brave design projects, such as the image of the Valencian Government or the signs for the A7 highway, which showed great courage and very few constraints. Among those avant-garde designers who lent aesthetic shape to a more modern Valencia in the eighties and nineties was José Juan Belda (Bétera, 1947-2021). With an intensive professional life, Belda was one of the most outstanding figures of Spanish design and he also played a key role in the development and evolution of contemporary Valencian design.

J.J. Belda managed to connect Spanish design with the international movements of the end of the twentieth century, especially with the Memphis group, via a personal vision of space and the objects it comprises, as Javier Gimeno emphasizes in his book about the designer “José Juan Belda: objectes i espais” (Castelló, UJI, 2009).

José Juan Belda, known by his signature JJ Belda, set out on his career in the world of design in the seventies, after graduating from the Escuela Barreira and the old Escuela de Artes y Oficios. He began working for the company Muebles Mocholí, where he learned about the technology of the sector and the trends of furniture design. When he left, he contacted other professional Valencian designers and those encounters and meetings gave rise to the constant formation of different groups, beginning with the founding of Nou Disseny Valencià (1975) and setting the seed for the Asociación de Diseñadores de la Comunidad Valenciana (ADCV). 

Together with Carlos Albert, a former fellow student, Belda later joined the studio Caps i Mans founded by Jorge Luna and Eduardo Albors. Caps i Mans was also the workplace of graphic designers Nacho and Luis Lavernia, who began to collaborate at the beginning of the eighties with the group ENEBECÉ, formed by Paco Bascuñán, Quique Company and Daniel Nebot.

The two studios first coincided to work on the logo and signage for the Devesa de La Albufera and they continued to cooperate on other projects before finally merging in the group La Nave, active between the years of 1984 and 1991.

With the dissolution of La Nave, J.J. Belda joined another studio, NI, together with other former members of La Nave, namely Luis González, Marisa Gallén and Sandra Figuerola.

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.