Emotional Abstractions, Javier Herrero
Opening January 10 2019, 8:00 p.m.
Exhibition from 10 to 26 January 2019
Extended until Saturday 2 February
ABSTRACT EMOTIONS
The nude is almost a genre in the history of Art. The human body always arouses controversy when it is shown explicitly in a painting and there are many examples of works that remain in our collective subconscious. As Joaquín de la Puente (Madrid, 1925-2001), the deputy director of the Prado Museum, pointed out: “The history of universal art could be written simply by limiting its study to the female nude. Limited to him, we would know sufficiently about the virtues of art of almost all times and even the spiritual context of the peoples who created it”; (<em>The female nude in Spanish painting;, Ediciones Novarte, 1964).
The work titled Emotional Abstractions is not limited to women, although it is who predominates, and aims to show the body without clothes and without aesthetic complexes. Wrinkles, smoothness or flaccidity, youth or maturity, all bodies are beautiful in themselves and their different configurations show an amalgam of textures that tell stories and draw biographies. Textures that to me suggest paintings, features, plastic traces.
And it is these concerns that lead me to intervene in the photographs of how many models, male and female, have posed for this project. With pictorial intentionality, I work digitally with nuances, scratches, colors and shapes the images and it is the same models that suggest me, the ones that transfer me their emotions, their sensations and feelings. Some more explicit than others, some modest, others more exposed, all, men and women, young and not so young, transmit plasticity and I translate it with interventions in their photographs.
A result that I name Abstractions ; in terms of painting, creative expression has such plastic work in the images, and surname Emotional ; for the feelings of proximity, exposure, empathy and refuge that the models themselves convey to me, all shown in a contemporary context in which no body, whatever its gender, is excluded from the respect it deserves.
J. Herrero
