Four exhibitions
Javier Arce
José María Guijarro
Jacco Olivier
Javier Calleja
24 September – 9 January 2011
Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB
C/ Saldaña s/n
09003 Burgos, Spain
www.cabdeburgos.com
Half-way between criticism contents and games and intermingled with a kind irony Javier Arce’s work (Santander, 1973) is a fruitful reflection on the evolution of art in modern society. Its inevitable trivialisation and the fact that it is limited to merely decorative functions, just like the real role that the works of the Great Masters in the History of art have in the imaginary contemporary collective. Through the so-called “squashed drawings” Arce makes use of the iconical power of some of these works—Frabcisco de Goya’s “The Disasters of War”; The Sixtine Chapel, Picasso’s Guernica, Velázquez’s “Meninas” and certain Warhol series…—so as to reveal their current condition of disposable objects for consumerism, throw away art, and prime targets for merchandising.
José María Guijarro
“Octubre” is one of the works chosen by José María Guijarro (Torre de Juan Abad, Ciudad Real, 1953) for his exhibition in the Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos: a 6-minute video formed by a succession of rural landscape photographs inviting the viewer to experience the passing of time from day to night. “Octubre” could also be a credible reflection of the singular way in which the artist understands art, a vision which scorns the outcome of creative work and focuses only in the process along this way which is always his point of departure, experimentation and vital substance. Guijarro defends in his own words that in art as in life the challenge is to “try and fail, but fail better each time”. It is along this way, inhabited by ideas, passions and doubts and materialised in a variety of material supports such as painting, sculpture, photography and video where the mystery of the artistic emotion may appear, or where the perfume of beauty may be perceived, where the poetic spark may arouse.
Jacco Olivier
In the same way it has changed our life style, the technological revolution of the 21st century has opened new creative paths in the world of art, offering new supports and different expressive possibilities. It is this field where the Dutch artist Jacco Olivier (1972) works, who, for many years has been exploring the potentiality of cinema applied to painting by working meticulously in such a way that entails a continuous re-working of the canvas and the capturing of any change in the pictorial composition, of almost every brushstroke, so as to convert -this series of photographs into a short animation film. It is a sort of video-painting. They are “animated pictures” bestowed with a dream-like movement, of a bewitching effect- accompanied by a sound track often made with sounds recorded by the artist himself.
Javier Calleja
In Javier Calleja’s (Málaga, 1971) installations tiny objects are found next to enormous ones, microscopic worlds next to disproportionate universes, tiny toys with exaggerated tables or matches. With the soul of a playful child, Calleja sets up a chaotic and surrealist laboratory which manages to alter the structure of the space where it is placed and it makes the viewer reflect on his/her own size within the world that surrounds him/her. This artist deals with the contrast between the diminutive and the gigantic and through a playful and entertaining proposal he goes one step further into the artistic question of the occupation of space, approaching and going beyond conventional references and suggesting unknown distances and dimensions, which are not only physical but intellectual,too.
It is through the eyes of a child that Calleja’s artistic stimulus is best appreciated; a child who takes games seriously and who purposefully submerges himself into the enigma of a geometric world aiming at expressing the diversity of the reality in which he takes part. In this collector’s room, in the playrooms dreamt of by the artist there is room for every shape, size and colour; solid or unstable objects; small dolls with cubic heads; child-like clouds and houses…a multi-coloured stock with an array of unique pieces untidily distributed which are dominated by magic and fantasy.
