Jordi Alcaraz. Gnòmon: BARCELONA

 

 

The artist escapes momentarily from the turmoil of the world to capture temporality and observe it through a magnifying glass; to work on it in a thousand different ways, unlike how we experience this reality in our everyday life, where immediacy, fragmentation and alienation prevail.

 

Alcaraz makes the multiple variants of this abstract reality visible through dynamic works in which the play of light and shadow prevails, achieved through formal, material and volumetric contrasts, which he creates combining delicate and ethereal materials, such as glass or paper, with others which are coarser and heavier, such as stone or coal.

 

The works that we find in this exhibition are therefore topical creations, which at the same time engage with a universal artistic concern that can be traced throughout the history of art. We are referring to the fugit irreparabile tempus (it escapes, irretrievable time), which Virgil already talked about in the 1st century BC, and which has been discussed from the tradition of Memento mori —a subject which emerged in the enlightenment of mediaeval books and which reached artists like Van Gogh and Picasso— to the persistence of the first avant-garde movements on capturing the “photograph” of a moment. This concern was also talked about by Salvador Dalí, with whom Alcaraz shares the same subject matter and, even, the aesthetics of “camembert clocks”, a time in movement, changing.

 

From this tradition, updated with his own experienceand heterogeneous experimentation which merges conceptual art and matter, here Alcaraz presents us with a set of pure and precise works in which the tension between visuality and concept is perceived.

These works, as mentioned by Biel Mesquida —with whom we had the pleasure of collaborating for this project, together with Jean Marie del Moral—: “reveal the tick-tock of an imaginary time. / At a glance generating the passing of time which reaches us in a contour of silence. / Seeking textures of transparency which show the invisible in a solid state”.