Writings and Essays
By José Juárez.
In the recent
pictorial work, the feminine figure appears naked as a constant, as a detail of herself, the most sublime.
That constant is the rupture with the produced work in the 80's. I am against
creating stereotypes or formal mannerisms that, in the end, become decadent. My
constant research takes me to find
new forms that give new life to my work, so that it stays effective in its
space and in its time.
That
is to say: “all change is for the spirit a kind of a necessary freedom.” To me
the change is indispensable and beneficent; to change is to reborn, it is a way
of existing. Therefore, in terms of the so decisive and total change, a
creative instant marks all plastic evolution. Regarding that indispensable
change, Bergson asks: “How not to understand that a new era always opens up
by means of the absolute thing?”
Thus, the nude is
an art form invented by the Greeks in the century V, in the same way that the
opera is an art form invented in Italy in the XVII century. The conclusion is
too abrupt, but it has the merit of putting out that the nude is not a topic of the Art but an Art
form. A heap of nudes does not move our empathy, but rather it
produces disillusion and discouragement. For this reason I do not imitate their
nature; my intention is to perfect it, to transform it, to make it more
sensitive, to give it a new entity. That new setting in scene, that
transformation of the sign is an art form, a style, that I call New
Figuration.
So, although the
naked body is not more than the starting point of my artistic work, it is,
however, a pretext of great importance for me. My intention is to show, even
more explicitly that the nude does not simply represent the body, but rather I
relate it through analogy with all the structures that have become part of our
imaginative experience.
The Greeks
perfected the nude so that the man could feel as a God; and in certain way,
this still is its function. For we no longer suppose that God is as a beautiful
man, we feel the divinity still close in those auto identification gleams that
we experience when, through our body, we find to have conscience of an
universal order.
From the
metaphysical point of view the time only has a reality, that of the
Instant. And the feminine detail is a form of accentuating more one of
the instants of my personal experiences. Revived and structured thought that
capture later on the canvas the notion of the duration of that
instant, between the future and the past; among the before and
the later: the detail is
undoubtedly, an instant, a moment of solitude. There, where the time is
presented to me as a solitary instant, of a naked solitude in the purest
moment, in the moment of the creativity. In that instant the artist lives the
most distressing and dramatic moment of her artistic chore.
Because
the creative acts are extracted sensorial episodes of a continuity called
duration, it is that space in between two edges of time. But that continuous
plotting in which our spirit
embroiders discontinuous drawings –ideas or fragments forms of acts─ is nothing but the laborious
and factitious construction of the creative chore of our spirit. Because, time and space only appear
as infinite when they do not exist.
And when talking of the time, it is nothing else but the instant in which we live. Everything is exalted
in front of the irreplaceable presence, which needs to die to reborn in other
objects, equally pure.
From the formal point of view,
in my work, the human figure is not always represented completely; I fragment
it or I set a detail, an intentional part. The feminine figure sometimes
appears in first foreground or as a shade of the main figure, but it is also
unfolded in the spaces of the triangular composition.
I define the detail
as in Italian language makes it is said,
particolare, that is to say,
as a part of a figure, of an object or of a combined one and not the dittagli that is equal to take care a
lot of the details. As a general rule, I take care of everything of the work
and the feminine detail that I propose
is an art form. It is a work that proposes or it insinuates a visual discourse,
in the inner plastic language with different reading levels. In short, the work
is part of the instants of my life —the purest happiness— the one that has gotten
lost in the space, among a before and an after the lived time and that seeks to
transcend through the creative work.
