Estepona, Málaga,
Self -taught and initiated in the restoration, the Cadiz artist Juan Miguel Quiñones learned from the hand of this last discipline the techniques of ancient teachers, especially in the field of sculpture and stone size. To his own work he has taken some of these procedures, subject to contemporary purification, conjugating them with a particular sense of humor and with the use of precious stones: in a good part of his creations the daily object approaches the work of art, even tries to melt them, also bringing the notion of likelihood to that of artifice.
They also shelter paradoxes: although, a priori, we can all feel familiar with their motives, evocative of multiple experiences that are often playful, quiñones creations do not propose closed interpretations, rather allow to project their own memories, in addition to entering a trapTojo between material and conceptual.
Under the commissioner of Mariella Franzoni and Flor Reiners, his usual gallery owner, this summer his work is presented at the Mirador del Carmen de Estepona center, the Malaga city where Quiñones grew -he is his first individual there. The exhibition is entitled just “to the origin” and has almost two hundred representative pieces of his work in the last fifteen years, but also of the object dimension of his own childhood on the Costa del Sol, in the form of ice cream, skateboards or surf tables, very contemporary goods that he replicates using methods with centuries of antiquity.
The sample route is structured in six thematic sections, linked from its same titles both to the creative journey of this author and its ties with the southern landscape and with the urban imaginary of our time (Origin, sketches, the summer factory, Punta de la Plata, Mar and Sierra, and When the sun warms up); Most of his works come from private collections and some have been specifically devised for this monograph.
We will contemplate marble work that involve drills of those everyday pieces, both on a real and oversized scale: ice cream, toys, fins, surf tables, scooters …, objects that have a brief, or ephemeral use in our lives, but that you make in long -permanence monuments that surrender to the best of all existence: the memory or desire. Long is also its elaboration process: artisanal, focused on cuts and inlays, in trials and errors and normally endeavored physical work that involve the body (and gesture) and that have an atavistic origin.
It is no accident that this exhibition has taken place in summer (although it will be extended for a few months): almost everything in it refers to the sun, the beach and the enjoyment and the material collection of this station for those who live it on the banks, feeding that Mediterranean lifestyle that is not understood, in any imaginary, without rest, leisure and nostalgia.
In the case of Quiñones, this melancholy drinks from his childhood and the memory of which Henri Lefebvre described as pleasure architecturenotion developed in Spain by the sociologist Mario Gaviria: it refers to those landscapes conceived for rest, the desire and consumption that they proliferated on our coasts since the sixties and still enjoyed splendor in the nineties. According to the commissioners, These spaces, deeply linked to the global imaginary of the summer economy, project unpublished ways of living, feeling and thinking about the world from peripheries that, during the summer months, became an object of desire for the inhabitants of the large European and global cities in search of rest. At the same time, these imaginary were lived from within by the residents themselves, who experienced an urban reality marked by the superposition of production and leisure, work and pleasure, everyday life and show.
With stone, in short, Juan Miguel Quiñones comes to trace a new archeology of our fugacious vacations.
Juan Miguel Quiñones. “To the origin.”
Mirador del Carmen Center
Paseo Manrique Marítimo
Estepona, Málaga
From August 2 to December 14, 2025
