Joan Cardells was an artist from Valencia, Spain who co-founded Equipo Realidad with Manolo Ballester in 1965. They began their artistic career in 1966 and combined painting with making posters and magazine covers. They made two visits to Paris and spent a year working in Milan. In 1972, they signed a contract with the Punto gallery in Valencia, which gave them the financial stability they needed to concentrate on their pictorial production.

This marked the beginning of a new stage in Equipo Realidad's production, characterised by a greater informative potential of the images and a flight from indiscriminate satire. In 1976, Cardells left the group and, although Ballester continued to work under the same name with the photograp...