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31/1/2011

Jasper Johns / Victoria Civera

IVAM Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia

Jasper Johns
The Traces of Memory
Feb 1 - Apr 24, 2011

Exhibitions devoted to Jasper Johns are rare in general and even less frequent in Europe. The show that the IVAM is now presenting, featuring about a hundred works, consists of pieces that range over fifty years of one of the most enthralling and hallowed careers in the world of contemporary art. It includes paintings from American and European museums (National Gallery of Art, Washington; MFAH, Houston; Whitney Museum, New York; The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica; Milwaukee Art Museum; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate, London, among others), and from private collections which show the evolution of an exceptional oeuvre. The presence of these works is completed by a substantial loan from the artist which includes, among other pieces, the largest sculpture that he has made, created in 2007 and never previously exhibited. There are also inks on plastic and drawings hung on the IVAM’s picture rails. The exhibition would be incomplete without the group of prints that accompanies it. Jasper Johns’s graphic oeuvre, including etchings on copper and lithographs, is immense. As with Picasso and Matisse, printmaking is an omnipresent feature in his everyday activity, and as an eminent printmaker he has driven back and altered the limits of all the techniques that he has employed. Many of the works – a mixture of all techniques – which feature in this exhibition focus on the numbers and letters that have appeared recurrently in his work during more than half a century. Symbols of non-verbal communication are present in his paintings, prints and sculptures. In a process based on repetition, the artist shows the importance of the constant development of thematic registers.

Jasper Johns was born in 1930, in Allendale, South Carolina. He is unquestionably one of the foremost artists in the world of contemporary art. He is a tireless searcher who from the outset reacted against Lyrical Abstraction and Abstract Expressionism and remained faithful to a kind of aestheticism, drawing his inspiration from the history of art. Driving back the limits of art, he has included his own roots and those of humanity in his work, together with his knowledge and his fondness for the past. To quote a reflection made by an art historian, he is one of the last American painters who has retained “the aroma of the old Europe”. Jasper Johns is recognised now as an indisputable, emblematic figure of art, and his work, which played a decisive role in the birth of Pop Art and its consequences, also lies at the origin of many other innovations in the world of art.

Considered a promoter of Neo-Dada, he remains unclassifiable. Through his own creativity and the perfectionism which makes him such an extraordinary craftsman, Jasper Johns ceaselessly asks questions about the function of painting, the mediating role of a product that tries and touches the sensibility of the viewer.

He is an indefatigable worker who possesses the impressive power of constantly questioning himself and the “feeling of a very profound order” that Eugène Delacroix describes in his Journal, which the artist needs “to maintain the originality of [his] thinking despite the habits to which talent is inclined to abandon itself”.

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Victoria Civera
Slanting dreams
Feb 3 - Apr 17, 2011

This exhibition is not so much a mid-career coverage of Vicky Civera’s work over the last twenty years but it is rather a celebratory focusing on major aspects and key incidentals of her work. It picks up the precisions that seem unconsciously and undogmatically to characterize its essence: a deceptive lightness, a sly sexuality, an obsessive referencing of a self-absorbed family network, a constant circling around the presence of the fetish, a fecund painterly competence, a fluid surging lyricism, a deliberately cultivated hermeticism, and a bizarre and fragile psychology along with a deeply rooted inner strength. At a certain level the show is the sum of her life. It is deft, humorous, light in touch, and self-protectively twisted. Vicky talks a lot to herself: creative chatter!

Civera moves the world back into her shell, absorbs what attracts her and sends everything back, reread, modified, digested, mulled, and changed. I’ve known her for so many years that I guess I can say these things, perhaps sometimes being right and perhaps sometimes being wrong. As far as I am concerned the brute diamond at the centre of her world is the feminine: vulnerable, reserved, intimate, hidden and given.

Feminine not feminist but like the latter I suspect that she also slips between Freud and Marx. She knows that feminist politics redressed the image, set Freud as a reading and not as a truth, and she also knows that in a global world the spheres of the social and the economic are problematically reasserting themselves. Advanced capitalism lives in a spectacular world, Civera knows this and her change of scale may even owe something to it. Yet, always, she hurries back into her self, as the only anchor she has deeply emotional and never theoretically illustrative. It is a bruised rather than a comfortable process but it has been one of constant growth. The world does not let us alone and neither does Vicky – whatever the degree of mimesis her work proposes – ask it to.

The question thus becomes where do the new circumstances of contemporary global living leave her or, perhaps more succinctly, how does she situate herself in the midst of what will not be a short-termed crisis but rather a geopolitical upheaval that will result in radical readjustments. My answer to this question – and here I keep Marx and Freud in play – would be within the critical parameters of what we might call commodity fetishism. Vicky uses, enjoys, and abuses contemporary products, catch your eye objects picked up in the streets, cloth cuttings from a haberdashery store, industrial materials etc. Marxist fetishism is a matter of inscription, questioning how the sign of value comes to be placed on a commodity; whereas Freudian fetishism flourishes as a phantasmatic inscription, ascribing excessive value to objects considered to be valueless: high heels, belts, fashion items, small objects, jottings, closed containers.

Her world is oniric with occasional touches of the surreal; it is private, closed in on the rituals and surprises of the studio and it comes at us with a cautious smile. Her pieces live up against each other in an endless muted conversation and they ask us to be attentive, to be sensitive to detail, to the minor registers of the imagination – minor not because they are less significant but because they opt for the subtlety of understatement. Fetishisms create social and sexual constructions of things at intractable points that trouble the social or sexual psyche. Civera exploits these sensations.

The show brings together objects, installations, drawings and paintings. It shows both the range of her work and its coherence. To some extent it can be seen as a walk through a hedonistic fantasy garden inhabited by fragile, discrete, or sexually overt objects, accompanied by a series of muted secrets, leading us to an upper level where her sets of drawings serve as the corner-stones of her poetic, disturbingly personal and endlessly nuanced, lexicon. These works engage the eye but they also leave a curious after-taste: a gnawing twang.

For any further request we invite you to address the Department of Communication (34) 96 386 76 79 or send an e-mail to comunicacion@ivam.es

Image: Jasper Johns, Green Angel, 1990. Collection Walker ARt Center, Minneapolis.

IVAM Institut Valencià d'Art Modern
Guillem de Castro, 118, 46003 Valencia
Horary:
From Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 - 20:00
Closed mondays

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