Jordi Alcaraz. From One Drawing Another: PARIS

The power of Alcaraz’ work lies in its seemingly impenetrable nature, which peaks our curiosity and claims our attention. Part of a long artistic tradition, Alcaraz’ practice echoes his culture and belies a multiplicity of influences. He is particularly interested in the classical genres of portrait, landscape and still life, which he introduces into his work from the point of conception and then both reveals and conceals through his poetic titles and compositions. Indeed, Alcaraz foregrounds a fusion of contradictory elements, alternating between light and darkness, robustness and fragility, unveiling and obscuring. The resultant body of work has a certain ethereality, highlighting the changing nature of our environment and almost forcing us to establish a metaphorical relationship with the world around us.

 

As a multidisciplinary artist (he is in equal parts a painter, sculptor, potter, draughtsman and engraver), Jordi Alcaraz’ dialogue with his medium – be it glass, pigment, stone, ceramic or iron – lies at the heart of his practice. In works such as Autoretrat (Self Portrait) (2022), for example, he combines the ancestral practice of ceramics with the use of an industrial element, methacrylate, to conceive of a work that is both metaphorically and literally suspended in time and space; on the verge of a precipice. In La nit I el dia (Night and Day) (2022), tradition and modernity come together once more in his use of methacrylate and iron wire combined with the practice of drawing with a lithographic crayon on paper. The dark black element suspended from a thin wire is bulging and flattened against the bottom of frame, appearing at once so heavy it is about to drop and so light that it is swaying like a pendulum in the wind.

 

Chromatically, Alcaraz’ production draws its expressiveness from an almost exclusive use of black and white. Light plays a key role; its reflection on and through his materials favours the successive formation of shadows, contrasts and reflections that brings a liveliness to the work, in perpetual variation. Another particularly innovative element in his work is the special treatment he gives to the frame. The latter is no longer seen as a secondary and passive component, but is reinterpreted as an essential element, inherent to the work. The artist creates his own frames and integrates them into the composition, establishing a dialogue between the container and the content, in a singular relationship of reciprocity.

 

The artist never seeks to conceal the genesis of the creative act, on the contrary, he preserves its vestiges in the heart of his work, revealing its entrails characterized by the presence of torn cardboard, dripping paint, screws and wires crossing the mount. The gestation of the work and the performative act from which his final creation stems, are inseparable from its result. His work can thus be situated on the cusp of various 20^th-century artistic trends including Arte Povera, Abstract Expressionism and Informal Art, while at the same time displaying an innovative contemporaneity and not confining itself to any predefined artistic genre.

 

Despite various exhibitions in Europe and North America, Alcaraz’ work has never been the subject of a solo show in Paris and this exhibition is an unprecedented opportunity to discover his universe.