27 - 29 enero 2017
Almadén  13, Madrid

 

 

The work of Guillem Juan (Canals, Valencia, 1981) has an aura of mystery that seems to slip through the cracks of the buildings he represents.

 

In his latest work, “El Espacio Oculto”, his series Heterotopías continues this investigation based on the principles exposed by Michel Foucault on “other spaces”. This series focuses on a specific type of building: the theater, places dedicated to representation. In these spaces, fiction deals with questions of reality.

 

This work  inspired by the reading of Foucault and the architectures of power, in the pieces in which black is the main color, this seems to be shown in a much more evident way. The great French thinker said that buildings are built with different functions depending on their shape, especially those intended for surveillance, care or punishment, and that this shape already housed the corrective and protective function in both.

 

Power is something intangible but it is manifested through various means of social use, and architecture is one of them; it is the place we live, where we work... it is everywhere.

 

Guillem Juan tries to glimpse some of this in his work: how concepts, memory and representation appear in human constructions, and how,  power dynamics are manifested through buildings.

His drawings show chaotic but apparently ordered spaces for this purpose: to pervert the established plan and elevation model.

 

 Thus, his works mix places and non-places, real spaces and fictitious spaces, creating infinite possibilities, fragmenting what already exists and creating something new that suggests new paths.

 

In his reflection on architecture there are certain Renaissance reminiscences in that profuse interest in planimetry and perspective, it is a renaissance brought to the present with today's social and historical connotations. In these pieces, the look is fundamental, it forces us to interpret those almost abstract forms that we see to give them a final meaning.

In a strict sense, it is not just a representation, but a highly critical discourse with our Western thought.

 

It focuses on the representation of space from the hybridization of disciplines, between architecture and artistic production. Issues related to memory and power dynamics that are structured through architecture emerge from traditional planimetry based on drawing. This is his fundamental work tool for the subversion of language and graphic systems of architectural representation.

 

The final result is a millimeter and scientific exercise of almost abstract works made through transparencies, rotations, superimpositions, combination of different perspectives, and the projection and deconstruction of forms, thus,  develops impossible architectures that they refer to non-places, counterspaces, utopian structures and surveillance.

 

Some highly poetic and political pieces with which to delight ourselves visually and go further conceptually. We could say that architecture has an ideology, and this is what Guillem Juan wants to show us. Its buildings are in continuous evolution.

The lines and planes that compose them tend to expand.

 

Guillem does not place the viewer in front of an architectural plan, but within an orderly explosion that alters his relationship with space.

 

Systems of forces collide to generate new realities. The result of this work is a manipulated plane that develops a non-existent but documented reality.

 

An excellent job to understand that no discipline is subject to any theme and that the drawing can be perfect to generate a critical and philosophical work.