Salvador Juanpere: On Artists, Tools and Territory…

The Castell de Vila-seca hosts the exhibition Salvador Juanpere: On Artists, Tools and Territory…, organised by the Vila Casas Foundation. This retrospective presents a series of pieces from different periods, inspired by different formal concepts from the artist Salvador Juanpere.

The exhibition is divided into three sections which take the visitor on a journey through the consciousness of Salvador Juanpere as an artist who establishes dialogues with the past and with his own practice as a sculptor in his efforts to respond to the artistic contemporaneity of our times.

In the first section, entitled (LLAVOR) AR (“SEEDING/WORKING”), we find works that illustrate both the close relationship with nature that the artist has cultivated since childhood and the artistic dimension that he has inherited from tradition, moulding him as a sculptor.

The honesty and intimacy with which Juanpere approaches his creations, and his meditations on the work of the artist, are similarly evident in the next section, F(EINA) (“WORK/TOOL”). In this second space, the sculptor’s craft and the possibilities of the work occupy the centre ground. Here, we see that the process is, in fact, the final work.

Artistic practice is, then, at once a manual and an intellectual endeavour. The works in the third and final space, ES(CULTURA) (“SCULPTURE/ CULTURE”), exemplify this concept. Here, Juanpere once more evokes past masters and establishes a dialogue with their works, marking them with texts.

We invite you, then, to discover the work of an artist who gives form, meaning and aesthetic value to the world around us in order, perhaps, to bring us closer to the deities with a series of pieces from different periods, inspired by different formal concepts. Installed in the wrinkles of time, these works trace a unique itinerary: (llavor)ar (seeding/working), f(eina) (work/tool), es(cultura) (sculpture/culture) which stretches from his origins to the hours spent in the studio and the works of artists he admires, a veritable declaration of intent.

ABOUT SALVADOR JUANPERE

Salvador Juanpere (Vilaplana, Tarragona, 1953) is an artist whose career began in the 1980s with work clearly influenced by minimalism and arte povera, as we can see in such works in this exhibition as Cub (“Cube”, 1981-1982) and De massa unde fuit plasmatus Adam (1238) (2017). In 2008, Juanpere said that “The construction of any work of creation is a celebration of the journey”. Accordingly, all his work focuses on the process of creation, a process that embraces recognition of and admiration for both the great masters of the past and the artistic tradition he has inherited and which has inspired him throughout his professional career. The process also takes account of his origins in Tarragona, the natural elements characteristic of that territory and his life in the studio where he turns the most absolutely quotidian, that which is apparently secondary, that which is purely functional in the production of a work, into the artwork itself.