Un tratamiento superficial
“Un tratamiento superficial” is the title of the exhibition that Juan López (Alto Maliaño, 1979) presents in the Chapel and Room 9 of the museum. It consists of two interventions, one in each space, in which the history of the place, its various presents, and the intuition of possible futures are invoked. Juan López’s trajectory is marked by the boldness with which he has always interpreted the specific. His interventions always exude an allusion, more or less subtle, to a conscious and attentive way of being in the world. It is often said that every artistic position must necessarily be political. Today, there is indeed a prominent tendency to give literal form or image to that way of being political, with the consequent contradictions that arise when such literalness enters the commercial circuit. This is not the case with Juan López, whose approach to his practice stems from an attachment to the modest and unprejudiced nature of everyday trades, whose tools he also uses to evoke that real life that Claire Etcherelli described in her wonderful book about the women workers of Paris.
The formal pretext López employs in Room 9 is the original fresco located in the lunette on the back wall. Part of the surface has suffered the expected ravages of time. Here, there is an exercise in archaeology through which he traces the past of the space. He also uses, a method also present in the Chapel, a recurring strategy in his work: turning a fragment, a shred of a form, into a kind of personal typography to construct an alphabet, and thereby suggest the possibility that the spaces he intervenes in can be “read.” The fragments and potential typographies are created here using an industrial method, pressurized sandblasts, that remove the plaster from the wall and reveal unforeseen tones derived from both recent and more distant pasts, in a diligent exploration of the memory of the place. López abstracts images from the fresco, an entablature, part of a capital, the halo of a saint, as well as from already empty areas, worn down by time.
In the Chapel intervention, López presents another mode of working that is no less his own. This is a space loaded with ambivalences, a place, if we may say so, bastardized. Extensive research went into this intervention, as he explored the rhythm of the arches, the possible inflection of the ribs, the additions, and the palimpsests they gave rise to. He visited the chapel of the National Museum of Sculpture, as Juan Carlos Arnuncio, the architect who remodeled our Chapel, suggested he would find important clues there.
The architecture of the chapel has undergone extraordinary remodeling, but it leaves many loose ends in terms of the meaning and rhythm of its elements. Truncated arches, diffuse ribs, a relationship with the cloister wing that is perhaps credible but wholly imprecise. The artist quickly became aware of this sense of estrangement, understanding that time had played to its advantage in the layering of different stylistic strata. This is what López seizes upon, proposing from fiction elements of contemporary construction, industrial trusses that stand out for their neutrality and standardized character. In a way, these trusses carry a trace of the sign the artist always pursues, for their triangular form could evoke low double quotation marks, parentheses, brackets, or other punctuation marks, analogous to the way López gives rhythm to space.
There is something striking in the making of these structures, as they emerge from the original stone and share its texture, hinting at a temporal wink and suggesting that these modular structures could have always been there, as a continuation of the broken ribs of the space. If the action López proposes in Room 9 seeks pasts from an image, the fresco, damaged by time, in the Chapel he offers a counterpoint of great boldness, introducing possible new formal solutions that contribute to the stylistic layers accumulated over centuries and different construction styles. The trusses are industrial, standardized elements, far from the sense of originality, uniqueness, and prestige that we tend to attribute to historic architecture. Juan López, who always tends to work against the grain, inserts these forms into the conversation surrounding the classicism that dazzles in this museum, shaking the norm and challenging the canon.
Text by Javier Hontoria.