Salvador Juanpere Juanpere

Salvador Juanpere believes that “art is a formal gauge of fears, a kind of general consciousness of the anxieties of our time.” Without emitting any sort of judgement regarding what is art and what is not, he is able to reflect on this idea to better understand why he creates. In contrast to purely conceptual art, his work is closely related to formalist artmaking. He combines this with a realist aesthetic in certain projects. This allows him to create a more superficial first reading, an initial image that for Juanpere is able to connect more immediately with the viewer.

Later, however, he makes a distinction between the first viewer and a second type, more willing to look upon things in depth. This individual is prepared, and is the one Juanpere addresses with his sculptural work. In these works, we see an artist speaking of his own creative process. In the quest to dignify instruments for sculpting we see a vice made of wood. Once these wooden tools have been placed on an altar, they become a metaphor of the sculptural process. The marble fragments spread out across the floor are like creative remains, subtle clues and absences that speak to us of what is there but cannot be seen.

The artist’s technique, developed from years of experience including time spent in rural settings and understanding and appreciation for craft, results in objects that are exquisitely represented, although this is not the final objective. In this case technique is a tool for a more intellectual meaning. Salvador Juanpere makes a claim for an attitude of romantic nostalgia when it comes to manual tools and mechanics. This is where the artist’s concept of art comes out most clearly, as he expresses his anxiety for the specific period he is living in.

We also find concepts like progress and catastrophe, paradoxes between rural and industrial reality, and similes of his admiration for historical sculptors like Bernini and for classical civilizations. All civilizations show signs of progress and catastrophe, and this is seen in the artist’s studio as well. In this installation, the finished piece shares the space with leftovers and ruins, so it becomes all told an instrument. The representation of these specific tools is what gives them form. Tools for creating have here been created and exhibited, raised to the status of art.

According to the artist, the world tends towards chaos and entropy, with art setting itself up as a form of resistance. He perceives art as “a match-up against life.” This is where his creative spirit comes from, ever battling for a definition of art and life. His continual recollections of past periods could be his way of admiring society and civilization, as based on less evident forms of chaos. Apollonian perfection, contained and aesthetic, has an importance in his creations, like a personal sign. In this piece a marble heart, classical and pure, is surrounded by organic veins, a suggestion of the artist himself, reduced (though not simplified) to marble and bronze.

This realistically rendered Juanpere drawing demonstrates how skilled he is in a variety of techniques. His interest in realistic depiction and precise technique does not take away from the conceptual foundation of his work. Following the premise that the artist highlights palpable features of reality, we find Juanpere accentuating the sensibility and poetics of an everyday tool. Nevertheless, the relationship he has with it makes up part of a different domain, and not one of a simple, everyday object. Art is what adds a certain level of sensorial and emotional experience to it that it did not have before. It is now incumbent upon us to ask whether Juanpere is bringing us a new sensorial experience that previously we had not perceived, which we are now able to understand and comprehend on the same plane of depth and poetry it is presented to us.

Once again, it is absence which speaks loudest. Containers reduced to their minimum essence seek to set themselves along a borderline, somewhere between what they are and what they are not. They refer to pieces and artists of special interest for Juanpere, containers of collective memory and the artist’s as well. Such recollections, first kept, then shown, allow us to reflect upon creation, artists and their place in the history of art. This piece is a small homage in the form of reflection. As the artist has said, “a metaphor straddling density and nothingness, a kind of paradox lying somewhere between particle physics and the immensity of dreams.”

The artist perceives creation as an instigator of what we feel, think and experience. This makes it possible to set up connections between art and life, not allowing the artist to be separated from the work. Juanpere builds by using an artisanal process and organic material, which is in itself a contradiction. Here he presents an automobile engine, where the production has been fully mechanized; it is an example of the industrialization process, where craft has gradually lost out as industry has advanced. We might imagine that the artist is speaking of himself and his contradictions, but also of his concern for science and progress, along with his passion for manual creation.

Sculpture could be thought of as one of the oldest trades in the world. Ancient tools, the construction of buildings and their evolution were often the result of how sculptural processes were evolving. Matter gives life to form, and while doing so is able to create something new. When the sculptor creates, he or she takes matter in his or her hands and passes it through tools, adding and subtracting to compose. In this case the result is a compact marble recipient, likewise made up of compact marble pieces. The piece recalls an architectural construction. As occurs with many of his pieces, here the artist refers to history. We appreciate the refined taste, as expressed in the details, and the symbolic value taken on by the materials.

In Salvador Juanpere we find two kinds of intellectual concerns. The first involves sculptural practice in and of itself: creative processes, materials and basic tools to construct with. This first aspect arises out of the need to do and create, and from concerns and thought about sculpture itself. The second is based on the evocation of concrete creations in the artistic scene, culture or Roman and Italian science. The introduction of features of “scientific gaming” in his work is suggestive of how he understands art. In some of his pieces we find mathematical theories, like the Fibonacci series. If we so sought, we could also identify a third set of concerns, synthesizing the previous two, where an example would be La persistència del fang.