Javier Pérez – Revelaciones III

The recent works of Javier Pérez express something powerfully melancholic. Not the passive kind but a melancholy concerned with the understanding of our time. Javier Pérez is Spanish: born in Bilbao in 1968, his imagination is deeply marked by the baroque form of Spanish mysticism and its relationship to death. For a long time, he has been thought to be solely concerned with bodies, whereas his entire practice revolves around issues of identity, our relationship to the world and the sometime tenuous links that tie all forms of life together. “I reflect upon human condition, the way we are made, and what it means to be human as well as the fleetingness of existence.”

With Revelaciones III, made at the end of 2017, Javier Pérez takes on a broader and more abstract approach. Body and identity remain but under a more metaphorical form. Each piece of this edition of eight, enhanced with ink and gold pigments by the artist, shows commitment, the involvement of his body and mind as well as an extreme level of concentration. Each work results from a sort of performance during which he finishes it up within the day. The dozen of layers of ink, the imperious necessity to repeat the same gesture layer after layer and to control each muscle of his hand and arm bear witness of a body at work. But beyond the body, this series also reveals a mind trying to address art history, and especially the question of the sublime in the 20^th century (from Barnett Newman’s color fields to Rothko’s “atmospheric fields”). In that regard, there is a negative work in Javier Pérez’s pieces, an effective attempt to dig into the visible to question the very act of seeing. What do we see: a physical act or an artistic product, a repetitive abstraction or a self-referential game about the essence of painting? None of these answers seems satisfactory. What remains is this inner light proving that it is still possible to be absolutely contemporary while asserting the importance of the sublime.

Javier Pérez currently lives and works in Barcelona.