Javier Garcerá, between East and West

Madrid,

His exhibitions in galleries have been frequent (Daniel Cuevas represents him in Madrid), but to date Javier Garcerá had not starred in an institutional exhibition in the capital; CentroCentro offers it until next May, under the curator of Isabel Tejeda and the title of “El pico al aire”.

Due to the large format of most of its pieces, the subtle light and the vivid contrast of the dominant red tones in the paintings with the darkness of the walls of the fourth floor of the Cibeles Palace, this project has been conceived as an extensive immersive installation of which fifty compositions are part, twenty of them unpublished.

The ultimate purpose of this montage is to encourage the viewer’s concentration and slow contemplation of these works; Generate a space that distances noise and promotes peace. Ultimately, this desire underlies Garcerá’s own pieces and the less than spontaneous procedures of which they are the fruit; In the words of the commissioner, Garcerá positions himself critically but poetically against the dizzying life in which the consumption of dozens of images per second leads us to an epidermal and barely reflective gaze (…). The artist aspires to another way of looking as an alternative way of placing oneself before the world, before the things and events that surround us. It proposes that we stop and look inside some paintings in which we reflect and enter without realizing it.

Javier Garcerá. The beak in the air. CentroCentro, 2025. Photography: Amapola Creativa

In that same vein, the title of the exhibition comes from Saint John of the Cross – that is one of the features, that of peak in the airwith which the author of spiritual song It referred to the solitary bird, an allegory of the contemplative soul, which is not inactive – and one of the works in CentroCentro resembles in its layout and dimensions an altarpiece, a resource that Garcerá had previously opted for, influencing his desire to structure a space of silence around the paintings.

Another of his intellectual references has been Goethe, mainly in his collection of poems. Divan between East and Westin which he advocated combining both cultural traditions, while among the purely plastic ones we can mention Fra Angelico or Manet, in the form of interesting allusions, although not explicit, that are combined with the favorite subjects of the man from Sagunto. His iconography is embedded in his personal and emotional life, changes and natures and architectures with something in common: abandonment; Thus, their themes refer to affections and needs, including recovering innocence and introspection.

In Javier Garcerá’s work processes, the material formalization of the pieces takes up a short time compared to the time dedicated to the experimentation of which they are the fruit: months of research that, sometimes, materialize in very few works, works that in turn open other starting points.

The fruit of this delay and thoroughness are images that penetrate the retina, but are difficult to apprehend: it is inevitable to think about what is in them of revelation, of latent presence; something lies beyond the surfaces of the fabrics, emerging slightly and intermittently and challenging our perception, because the eye perhaps unconsciously oscillates between the recognition of what it sees and its loss, a coming and going that also questions the static nature of the pictorial medium.

He often delves into the compatibility of revealing and concealing: the monochrome surfaces, common in his production and also in his most recent one, camouflage backgrounds that only a leisurely glance can access; Ultimately, this author proposes a kind of exchange: that of the slow time that he allotted to creation for our unhurried observation.

This exercise would not be possible without his careful use of light, which if, on the one hand, guides our attention in various directions, on the other it also seems to bring us closer to infinities hidden from a quick glance. The critic Delgado Mayordomo pointed out, regarding Garcerá’s past works, that To access these works reliably, one must abandon one’s alienated and digitized gaze, the one that greedily devours everything that is offered to it. A different perception is necessary, capable of conquering our own sense of experience and bringing awareness of what we are seeing to the present.