Sculpture, installation and serigraphy are the formats that we are going to find in Últimos recursos, a Juan López exhibition that links up with Surco, his previous appointment in our gallery in Madrid, which was recognised by the CentroCentro institution of the Madrid City Council as one of the 10 best proposals of the past year.
As usual, his work focuses above all on urban topics, the questioning of the established order and continuous reflection on language and its graphic aspects. Using different materials, often used on industrial or construction contexts, also recycled, he configures new alphabets and peculiar signs generated from the traces and remains that come from the organisation of the city and the use we make of it, such as the roads and way lines structures or the transport we use. On this occasion, a poetics of deterioration, wear and tear and finiteness, whose echoes we find in the current planetary environmental situation are all around the proposal.
His artistic process always begins with the attentive and critical observation of his immediate surroundings, venturing into a curious exploration of the urban space inherited from situationist drifts: an artistic way of conceiving everyday experience, of actively and creatively flowing with the places we inhabit. It is in this journey through the city that he notices the deterioration of the roads. Seduced by the plastic power of their rich textures, he decides to reproduce them through silicone casts and show them either as wall pieces or on free-standing structures in the room, decontextualising, bringing the outside in, symbolically tearing the skin off the streets to show them in a subversive context or in a context of alteration of order.
The problem of fuel and limited resources implicit in the title of the exhibition is also implicit in another series of sculptures made of resin that the artist has constructed from the molding of lost car parts found on the roads. Some of them hang on the wall, generating powerful pictographic aesthetics. Others form part of an installation that recreates what could be a fictitious ditch that runs through the room. Sculptural pieces with enigmatic forms are scattered around the “gutter”, a site-specific that brings again the exterior into the critical interior of the gallery.
Formalised also in serigraphs, these new images appeal to the viewer as curious cartographies that give rise to emerging meanings in the artist way of working from the gap, the disorder, what is left out, what is excluded and also from recycling, perhaps as a way of recovering the lost energy that in the process of wear and tear over time leads to the imbalance that precedes the end of a system (entropy).
These pieces speak to us about the world today, our way of inhabiting it and the power structures that govern us from original points of view, making poetry, using metaphors. Without ever detaching himself from reality, despite the abstract appearance of the results, he unfolds his new samples, forcing the spectator to the healthy and necessary exercise of looking more attentively, playing at interpreting, understanding other perspectives.
ÚLTIMOS RECURSOS
12th August – 1st October, 2022
Galería Juan Silió
C/ Sol 45, bajo. 39003 Santander.
Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday,
10.30AM – 1.30PM
6 – 9PM