Grounded in the proposition of continuing to address the diverse questions affecting emerging art, for its 2022 programme the Espai 13 of the Fundació Joan Miró presents Dive and Immersion, an exhibition series curated by Pere Llobera, with artistic proposals by Victor Jaenada, Marcel Rubio Juliana, Marria Pratts and Martín Vitaliti.
The series takes its name from the free translation by José Ángel Valente of the poem "Il tuffatore", by Eugenio Montale, which was inspired by the fifth-century BC funerary painting found in the necropolis at Paestum. Both the poem and the painting, where we see a young man diving head first into the water, reflect on life, death and the circularity inherent in both.
Cut through by this tragic yet lucid vision of life, the exhibitions of Victor Jaenada, Marcel Rubio Juliana, Marria Pratts and Martín Vitaliti reflect on these artists' massively radical commitment to their work. All four of them, in their condition of what Pere Llobera calls "natural painters", use installations, artefacts and stubbornly pictorial gestures to address the irreducible need to find our own voice within existence.
This exhibition takes its starting off point from an incident that took place during Victor Jaenada’s tender childhood, in the home of his grandmother, which could have ended the artist’s life well before its time. The project revolves round the Unamunian "tragic sense of life", yet considered from the reverse angle. That is, here the fatality of death is replaced by the anxiety of life. Or to say this in a more precise manner: the idea literally hovering over the gallery is the discomfort the artist feels from the possibility of having been returned to that very nothingness.
Marcel Rubio Juliana engages and updates the ancient alchemical concept of transmutation. Resurrection is an occurrence in the spiritual realm that pertains to various sacred traditions in which the dead return to life. In evoking a transition which by its very nature cannot be represented, Rubio Juliana recurs to alchemy and its idea of transmutation. Following on the principles of this historical discipline, there is no disassociation between matter and spirit.
For the curator, Pere Llobera, Marria Pratts’s 1 possession Drift conjures up the intense atmosphere that raged through the late 1970s and early 1980s-tough times that saw new attitudes burst onto the cultural scene. In common with young people from that time, Pratts also belongs to a generation on the edge that expresses itself in radical, hard-hitting style.
Martín Vitaliti presents Silly Symphony, a project which appropriates ideas from early American cartoons from the 1930s, the golden age of animation, which began with the arrival of the first animated pictures with synchronised sound.
