Javier Chozas / La Piel Construida (The Fabricated Skin)
July 2 - October 12, 2020
Tabacalera. La Fragua
C/ Embajadores 51. Madrid, Spain
Caress yourself. You know that layer of you, smooth and fragile, that surrounds you and presents you to the world? That same boundary that separates you or brings you closer to me. Skin. On some parts of the body, it is thinner and more delicate. The skin of the lips is darker, pinker and even more sensitive. It reacts sooner, for example, to heat, to cold, to kisses. And of the feet too. And of the neck. The skin of the eyes, around them, wrinkles more quickly. We live inside a vulnerable and intelligent sack, regenerating itself and changing with time and with life. Contained inside it, protected and exposed through it.
La Piel Construida is a stage inhabited by contradictory and rarely friendly energies, such as desire and violence, lust and doubt, disguise and the moment when it falls. For me, a leap into the visual universe of Javier Chozas. From a group of sculptures, Chozas proposes an extended reflection on this boundary that shapes us, the skin, taking it, perhaps, as a place from which to think. An organ almost two square metres in size from which to go deep into the most hidden and erratic parts of our formation as individuals.
The show is arranged as a continuum which begins, spatially, with a series of sculptures/fragments, a landscape of rubbish. Pseudo-anthropomorphic forms that we are able to recognize from exile. Broken bodies where we still see pain, but also desire, luxury, excess, ferocity and arrogance. A flash-forward to the scene of the crime (which may be yet to come). Or human ruins that tried, at one time, in a past/present, to feel pleasure, power or the divine. Greed and death.
A scene which is followed by a new moment, in which Chozas breaks the spatial horizontality and leans us out over true vertigo, the moment of haste and attempt. We find ourselves here with figures suspended at a precise instant of longing, haste or connection. Characters in a story on pause. The ground, covered with a mirror, is also empty beneath our feet, a labyrinth that makes me recall that Narcissus who could never touch himself. Deformed figures that run without moving forward, fall without realizing it, lose it in the attempt. They attempt without the what. Pressing.
*Fragment of the text by Sofía Corrales
La Piel Construida is a stage inhabited by contradictory and rarely friendly energies, such as desire and violence, lust and doubt, disguise and the moment when it falls. For me, a leap into the visual universe of Javier Chozas. From a group of sculptures, Chozas proposes an extended reflection on this boundary that shapes us, the skin, taking it, perhaps, as a place from which to think. An organ almost two square metres in size from which to go deep into the most hidden and erratic parts of our formation as individuals.
The show is arranged as a continuum which begins, spatially, with a series of sculptures/fragments, a landscape of rubbish. Pseudo-anthropomorphic forms that we are able to recognize from exile. Broken bodies where we still see pain, but also desire, luxury, excess, ferocity and arrogance. A flash-forward to the scene of the crime (which may be yet to come). Or human ruins that tried, at one time, in a past/present, to feel pleasure, power or the divine. Greed and death.
A scene which is followed by a new moment, in which Chozas breaks the spatial horizontality and leans us out over true vertigo, the moment of haste and attempt. We find ourselves here with figures suspended at a precise instant of longing, haste or connection. Characters in a story on pause. The ground, covered with a mirror, is also empty beneath our feet, a labyrinth that makes me recall that Narcissus who could never touch himself. Deformed figures that run without moving forward, fall without realizing it, lose it in the attempt. They attempt without the what. Pressing.
*Fragment of the text by Sofía Corrales