“The structure of the universe influences our way of philosophizing and feeling the universe”
(“Universe as a work of art”)
John Barrow
For his second solo exhibition, the Spanish artist Javier León Pérez presents INFINITE ORNAMENT. The artist finds inspiration in nature, its forms and its rhythms to rewrite a more personal world through the development of his own poetry with three-dimensional works made on washi paper, drawing and bronze sculptures.
Ornament, like the word Cosmos, have the same Greek root that refers to order. The ornament is a formula to order and encompass a specific space, and its purpose is to beautify it. Javier makes a reference to the cosmic order brought to a closer environment, and that ultimately finds a correlation to our own mental environments.
The work that he presents on this occasion makes a personal review of the landscape genre. Javier proposes organic and fractal shapes with paper as a formula to order light, filtering and coloring it. The paper is worked in a three-dimensional way on canvas, through which the entire surface is covered with small units of paper in the form of multicolored scales. In his drawings made on canvas, we can see a very organic way of understanding drawing and its processes, where the textures are made by a tangle of drawing lines, creating the sensation of volumes due to the condensation of said lines. The bronze sculptures are unique pieces made with a wax folding technique, playing with the element of water, movement and temperature, which is later melted down to generate the bronze piece.
Metamorphosis and dances: about Javier León Pérez
Within the modern tradition, emanating from the crisis of representation that took place in European art in the first decades of the 20th century, the organization of pictorial space
imposed a new disposition regarding the compositional structures in use up to then that acted in the space-surface of the painting. So, the space for action and exercise of art: the painting, was, from then on, understood as an organized plane with the intervention of very varied elements. Undoubtedly, elements strategically chosen for a greater operability both visual and sensitive for the viewer. The cases of Kandinsky and Mondrian, in this sense, are proverbial. Already then, color began to acquire a new relevance in Western art, effectively exercising all its possibilities of evocation. In the world of art, a whole contribution of new languages began that would be decisive for its later development, until then barely glimpsed in Western culture. Therefore, a path of exploration and revision of both plastic and decorative categories was opened, where the intention, uncomplexed by the unnecessary referentiality of the outside world, imposed the exploration of abstract languages; which, of course, were also traditionally valid in other cultures.
In this line of contributions that integrate the new concept of painting in modernity and, regarding the career of Javier León, his pictorial work for a few years now has been projected in actions that had to do with surface values. and its possibilities. These were shots in choreographies of punctuations and repetitive codes, generally of a graphic nature and substantially of paint deposited in brief punctual touches. In reality, they were atomized signals, deposited on neutral backgrounds, intentionally not signified by any color. They were interventions of different intensity on the shot: tensions and sequenced alignments, of different value; with frequent records of automatic spellings; generally in white on black that came to delimit the pictorial space itself. To finally express it in its same magnitude and format. In a certain way, they transcribed a type of writing from zero point, vibrant and self-concentrated, that seemed to swim or emerge, suspended or collected, in a space between neutral and sidereal; that, in its enhancement, on the surface, also acquired an interior approximation turned towards the conditions of the materials of white or graphite. They were paintings, therefore, with a calligraphic intention of serial language, based on notes grouped in formal masses and silent lines that could resemble landscapes or nocturnes. They would allude to possible orogenies and stellar constellations. In short, it was a type of austere and silent painting that was, of course, quite far from Expressionist gesture and intensity, but, at the same time, subtly spoke of time and the different ways of combining energy.
They were pictorially proposals speaking of a certain aesthetic minimalism, subtle and discreet, where color barely appeared or was the result of vibration effects or interactions of the materials themselves. Those “abstract atmospheres” cultivated by Javier León undoubtedly had an encrypted character, even nocturnal, which also revealed moods and psychological attitudes.
But, already in these last ten years, Javier León’s proposals have evolved towards volume and interior rhythms, becoming more protagonists in his more or less complex compositions. Generally directed, depending on the case, towards formal or organic architectures with great power of evocation. In his latest installments, the artist begins a kind of redirection and exploration of other ways of combining scales, energies, and psychological tensions. His compositions have become more encompassing, stretched and voluptuous, with a more direct and eloquent connection with the viewer. Color appears permeating articulated volumes, a consequence of highlighting formal lines of growth, but which also awakens memory, evokes, and gives meaning to those special constructions; ranging from the particular and fragmentary to the general, from the sedimentary to the biomorphic, from the articulated to the centripetal. Indeed, his new proposals have been, let’s say, configuring and growing, expanding, in new “nebulae, vortices and constellations”. Other times it is about filling a space with a certain internal value, entering what is already a monochrome magma, or acting as a “sea of petals” from a found structure.
Cleanly focuses on giving an unforeseen path to the energies of the target himself, carried away by a kind of “metamorphosis of the ethereal”.
“In terms of successes and results, these curiously take us back to certain dreamy annotations and drawings due to Leonardo himself. With which Javier León seems to identify with his own method of observing and proceeding, by extracting structures from data extracted from the knowledge of the real, as when Da Vinci transcribes his imagined drawings about the Flood. A series of exercises in which, questioning the scale of the viewer’s eye, the author turns relentlessly towards the swirling clouds and the wind that dominate his notes. However, Leonardo was already attracted to analyzing volatile forces of nature, by transferring the game of eddies and arabesques caused by surface waves and the internal forces of water, which were collected around 1509 in the Windsor codex. (12660v). In these suggestive drawings, the artist specifically analyzed the tensions of the aquatic fluid and the configurations that the water currents acquire in the face of certain interposed obstacles. As if da Vinci wanted to emphasize the fact that nature itself cannot be adequately contained within man-made limits. In this regard, Leonardo, in his Treatise, recommended to the apprentice artist: “Make some cardboard silhouettes in various shapes and throw them from the top of the terrace through the air; then draw the movements that each one makes in the different stages of its descent”. A certainly recommendable and sophisticated exercise, which, to a large extent, has a lot to do with the positions and work methods that inspire the new modular creations by Javier León. Spaces that are organized in volume, developed in scaly sequences that allude and “dance”, alluding to formal concretions that range from the physiological to the biological, botanical or geological to the mode of sediments of a formal, analytical and sensitive memory of the time; but that, in any case, they want to transmit keys and visions of universal constructions. In short, creations with the intention of finally diving into a magnified molecular or mineral structure or, perhaps, delving into the epicenter of the alignments of centripetal growth within the corolla of a flower. Javier León invites us to fully penetrate the tractions, narratives and slides that, in their great diversity, always contain certain fractal or biological energies, thus evoking the languages and laws of nature.”
Juan Fernandez Lacomba