Javier Puertolas's Profile

From: Spain
Joined: November 18, 2007
www.javierpuertolas.com

About jpc:

Born in Binefar (Huesca) SPAIN in 1947.
From year 1971, it resides and it works in Barcelona.
Painter and Professor of the Painting Department and Procedures Murals of the School of Art and Design "La Massana" of Barcelona.

Bows, filaments, trimmings, phosphorescence, explosions, projections, spirals, mutations, openings, superimpositions… a multiple range of effects and resources are developed in these paintings with surprising generosity. We are witness to an exuberant gushing of formal colours and structures. From this flow, a strange tension between chaos and composite order seems to arise, which needs solving, or not. Puértolas uses a curious strategy: in view of the saturation of visibility that characterises our contemporary society, he tries out a response that combines resistance and empathy at the same time. This is why his works show this degree of complexity and of dispersion, in the best sense of the word: seen as an acceptance and a desire to explore the dimensions of the current visual experience and the different ways of taking it on and translating it.
Some years ago, Javier Puértolas’ painting reached the formulation of a particular language that places it in the middle of today’s pictorial debate. His proposal is one that presents primordial questions on the condition of the image and the role of painting in the 21st century. It places itself in the knot of a series of aesthetic problems, however, beyond their detection and definition, it carries out a pictorial intimate practice and one of a lyrical scope that gives it its own meaning.

To appreciate Puértolas’ contribution, it is interesting and necessary to situate oneself with regard to parallel proposals. We could find an affinity with two people from recent batch of international artists who are in the forefront of the renewed peak of painting. The German, Franz Ackermann translates in his dynamic and colourful compositions the visual apprehension of the globalised urban world. In this, in fact, he is not far removed from a pop artist such as Rosenquist. On the other hand, Julie Mehretu sets up some chaotic, open maps that are lighter and more transparent in which signs and graphics treated with diverse styles are combined. These recent experiences come, in fact, from a tradition that dates back to the Mondrian inspired by New York or the overlapping landscapes of Maria Helena Viera da Silva. Puértolas is set in the genealogy of an abstraction we could call labyrinthine. There is a plastic tradition linked to the aesthetic of the fragment and of the expansive network. Cubism carried out the change of perceptive and representative paradigm that opened the doors to this painting. Frantisek Kupka’s decorative and mystic abstraction at the beginning of the century, or Peter Max’ psychodelia, in the 1960s are also two key episodes and much closer than one might imagine, of the excessive, overflowing aesthetic that arose from the saturation of visual stimuli.
We should mention that it is a line that is not very well defined in the Catalan context. Enric Planasdurà, a pioneer of geometric abstraction in the 1950s or the Sabadell resident, Joan Vilacasas, creator of the Planimetries, who introduced and hybridised the urban metaphor with informal language could be its precursors. However, it is perhaps in the slightly more recent Spanish context where we find artists who suggest dilemmas closer to those of Puértolas. One of them is Luis Gordillo, who formally and significantly deconstructed the image and contaminated abstraction with the pop worldview. However, in Gordillo, we find an irony and a post-modern eclecticism that Puértolas does away with, maybe because for him an emotive glance towards the world is still possible. Puértolas is not one of the disenchanted: it is important to mention this. Some deeper affinities could be found between Puértolas and Juan Uslé. In both of them, there is an awareness of the artificial nature of plastic language and of the idea of style, but at the same time, there is a persistent poetic desire. We should pay attention to qualifying the abstract aspect of Puértolas’ work. It is stylisation, it is not an extract of the clean, limited or moulded world responding to neurotic needs. We can make out, to the contrary, a need to go more deeply and to celebrate the multiple beauty of things.

Fifty years ago, Puértolas would have been vindicated and driven to apply his language to mural painting, when this was seen to be a sign of the integration of the arts. Today, however, Puértolas would have to choose, voluntarily, the limitation of the classical support of canvas. In fact, the rising technologies of creation, production and dissemination of image and of visual codes oblige one to look at the nature of the new system of representations and even to which point it explains or replaces the world from which it arises. Luis Brea, correctly, but maybe rather apocalyptically, considers a new cycle of civilization to have opened, one that is not logocentric but visual, in which the “diffusing of the art sub system in the expanded constellation of the practices of visual communication and of representation would take place in an irredeemable way” . Let us leave to one side what such a theory contains in the prolongation of the debate on the institutional definition of art. However, the confirming of an invasion of what is visual in a myriad of formats is pertinent. The new places and uses of the omnipresent image on televisions in homes, on the monitors and screens of public spaces, in files sent over internet, applied to any support or static or dynamic material are clear, although they still need interpreting. In view of such proliferation, painting seems reduced to a confined, archaic space. However, it is precisely this marginality that gives it an autonomy and a richness that renew its value.

Puértolas comes from photography. Like Courbet or Degas: there is no anti-pictorial desire in that. However, Puértolas adds a high degree of technical intervention on the initial material for his paintings. The images that he uses as models are worked on and modified thanks to the use of computer programs. If today’s painting is fed by technology it is because technology returns to it everything that painting gave it. The way of composing every image and of combining them together that the structures of computer software have imposed would not have been possible without the contributions of the first vanguards. The cutting and pasting, the combining and processes of transformation these programs with which we are all familiar propose, respond to the exercises of plastic deconstruction and reconstruction of a hundred years ago. We should mention that Puértolas does not come so much from the formalist purism that the modern orthodoxy of Greenberg wanted. He fits in better with the complexity that arose from collage, the poetry of the fragment, the statement of multiplicity and the need to hybridise abstraction and figuration. Painting is still a practice with meaning and one which creates thought. It enables individual exploration from a common patrimony of experiences, of which scientific and technological ones are a apart. Going back to the basic problems and to a simple technique enables a new approximation to the world. Jean Clair showed, for example, how important visual observation and the practice of drawing was for Ramón y Cajal to understand what was happening in his experiments.

However, I would like not to follow just one of the paths of the labyrinth that Puértolas offers. For example, it is important to point out something that he states with insistence: he is not interested in repeating paintings. A good part of modern painting is based on the idea of series, on systematically developing variants from limited motives or resources. On the other hand, there is a festive aspects in Puértolas’ painting. He does not rule out entertaining the eyes, he does not reject sensual pleasure, however, he does not fall into frivolity, but extracts a positive value from it as a provoker of sensitivity and of thought. All abstraction is on the threshold of decoration and this frontier nature needs to be taken on to be able to mix it up. Puértolas’ painting is speculative but it is also seductive and optimist. It is a joy to look at. The recent introduction of white and the interest in reflections seem to transmit a solar shine that influences the energetic aspect of the painting. The titles, however, take us to another fork. The importance of the word and of the literary exercise adds a tone that breaks away from the purely visual aspect. Puértolas’ titles often refer to exercises in thought or emergences from memory. What we see is a chromatic and spatial festival, a swarm of circulations and generations: it belongs to sensuality; what we read takes us to the psychic and linguistic area: it belongs to knowledge.

What, then, does the observation of this painting leave us with? Despite the fact that initially it could seem contradictory with the abstract dialect, Puértolas does an exercise in humanism. He wants to sing to the world, to individually take on chaos and artificiality to give it meaning. He does this through complexity and doubt: he does not submerge in a passive or hallucinatory way in what he sees but tries to take it on, as if he wanted, despite being in an area of maximum sensuality, to gain time to think and contemplate, to meditate. As in baroque work, Puértolas seems to want to celebrate excess and tidy it up, giving it meaning, and to state against the suspicious tyranny of those who are partial to what is univocal, the wealth and diversity of the stimuli that make life something infinite.

Àlex Mitrani