Javier Pérez

Galeria Carles Taché is pleased to present the exhibition “Revelations” by the artist Javier Pérez. The exposition groups part of its most recent production, which includes sculptures and drawings shown for the very first time in Spain.

With a particular cyclical view of time, in which life and death are simply two stages within the permanent transformation, Javier Pérez emphasizes and challenges poetically the fragile line between paradigmatically antithetical concepts such as attraction and rejection, interior and exterior, opacity and transparency, carnality and spirituality, or life and death, invading the exhibition space with a disturbing burden of fragility but still hopeful.

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river,” wrote Jorge Luís Borges. Javier Perez picks up the message and also give himself to the vital ow of Nature as a way to show their concerns and re ections about the passage of time. “I am interested in the ambiguity that certain forms show. There is a familiarity between the animal and the vegetable; both are determined by the same implacable law: they only exist in a state of constant transformation” says Javier Pérez. Hybrids of impossible shapes and apparently barren branches make up the series of bronzes Vida latente (2016) and Brotes I-II-III (2017), in which the vegetable, the animal and the mineral merge to show themselves shamelessly as carriers of life latent. Branches of peach trees, stoic olive trees or almond trees in blossom, sprout from pulsating hearts in a violent explosion of renewed life, showing, as in the series of drawings Fuentes de vida (2016), the transience of every living thing, as well as his responsibility and commitment during that short and eeting transit.

Madre (2014) is about the close and intimate connection between life and death. The mother surrounds with an abnegated and tender embrace the inert body of her son, bending and covering it in a protective way with her own skin/placenta in the shape of a mantle. However, in this case, the mother is not the giver of life, but the very incarnation of death. In a revisited reading of the religious iconography, the Mother, as in an invested birth, collects and receives in her entrails what was denied her at the moment of conception. The sculptural exhibition is completed with Un solo latido (2015), a metaphor about the desire and vulnerability of the human being facerd love or lovelessness and Máscara de seducción (2008) with which the artist challenges the viewer by questioning the concepts of identity and otherness.

Drawing has been a constant discipline in the artistic career of Javier Pérez and his creations are part of important collections of international prestige, among them the Center Pompidou with more than a hundred of his drawings. In the words of the artist “... the pencil is thinner than a hair, it must work by accumulation. Obsessive and primary gesture reminiscent of silkworms wrapping themselves to create volumes that close. We are thus faced with a mysterious interior in metamorphosis. I like to approach those perfections of nature, even if they become a sophisticated act ... “.

The series Lapsus (2017), Revelaciones II (2017) and Revelaciones III (2018) are a challenge to their own physical and emotional state: sharp, penetrating and light ink, paper soaked to the core, insistent gesture, obsessive, immediate slip emerging of the subconscious, without interruption, in horizontal, in a meditative state and close to the ground as if tracing among its own obsessions. The drawings are con gured as musical “pneumograms”, scores in which the harmony is given by the multiplication and superposition of layers and the rhythm by the frequency of their breathing until the organic appearance of random melodies.

Javier Pérez (Bilbao, 1968) is one of the most internationally renowned contemporary artists of his generation.

After studying Fine Arts at The University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (ENSBA), city where he settles between 1992-1997, Javier Pérez breaks into the international arts scene with his rst individual exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris in 1996 and a year later with his rst museum exhibition at Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg. His works are characterized by a certain syncretism, both in the method and materials used. Sculpture, photography, drawing, video and performance are used independently as well as together to create installations where interaction and exploration are essential.

The installation is one of the usual large formats in his artistic career. In 2001 he represents Spain in the 49th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, with the installation Un pedazo de cielo cristalizado. In 2004 he carried out the installation Mutaciones at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. In 2009 he presented Lamentaciones in the Cloister of the Cathedral of Burgos and in 2012 he made El Carrusel del tiempo for the Karl-Böhn Saal commissioned by the Salzburg Festival.

His work is part of important collections such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía or the Centre Pompidou.