Javier Garcerá ES, b. 1967

Javier Garcerá’s works, almost all of them created on shiny, translucent synthetic silks, are iconographically complex, baroque, exuberant and luxurious. The meticulous formal codes he uses to represent what is close and everyday prevent the viewer from arriving at an immediate reading of the image presented. Ornament is conceived as a skin that becomes narrative and contains as much depth as the structure itself. It is this skin that comes into contact with the viewer, a sentient individual rather than merely a thinking one, capable of sustaining a calm gaze that escapes the limited attention span produced today by the dizzying consumption of images.

If the ambiguity brought about by the technique encourages this experience of dispossession to which we have referred, the formal complexity, profusion of details and uninhibited ornamentation proposed here once again place the viewer before the attraction of an object that cannot be grasped in its entirety. Through its own formal characteristics, his painting once again eludes the gaze, while at times the gaze itself rebounds. It is a form of attraction connected to a sophisticated sensoriality, to the quality of a sensual experience of pleasure that embraces the body and exceeds the limitations of the “head”. It is the irresolvable ambiguity created around a series of dualities — figure/background, fullness/emptiness, figuration/abstraction, etc. — that produces this bodily experience, inviting us to surrender calmly to that “temporary dwelling” which, according to María Zambrano, is painting. For even in these uncertain times, the philosopher’s metaphor may serve us, perhaps more than ever, as a form of repair, suturing our discouragement.

Javier Garcerá (Sagunto, 1967) lives and works between Madrid and the Tiétar Valley.

Isabel Tejeda