Contraespacios by Guillem Juan

Contraespacios.

The work of Guillem Juan (Canals, Valencia, 1981) retains an aura of mystery that seems to slip through the cracks of the buildings he represents. His obsession with architecture as a space containing ideological elements has been his leitmotiv for years. His work is an interesting stimulus to reflect on the places we inhabit. The architecture is not exempted from the context in which it is created, and its forms and duties respond to a particular model of society. We could say that architecture has an ideology, and this is something that Guillem shows in the exhibition "Contraespacios" in Parking Gallery.

The drawing is, for this artist, its most important working tool which he uses through clear and decisive strokes combined with a subtle color. The final result are almost abstract works where the architectural floor plans of several buildings are superimposed on the elevation. With a precise and scientific accuracy, a construction is recreated through the mental map of diverse elements like its base and form. Somehow the obvious appearance of the building is abstracted by making our imagination recreate the final result thanks to the ground plan and the elevation. Guillem Juan also adds colours to specific parts of the works like green and red, which play with the plans and prospects.

His latest work is inspired in Foucault’s readings and the architectures of power. This inspiration becomes clear in the parts where black is the predominant colour. The great French thinker used to say that buildings are constructed with different functions according to their shape, especially those intended for the surveillance, care or punishment, since this kind of buildings already had the corrective and tutelary function. Power is intangible but it manifests itself through different social media, and architecture is one of them; It is the place where we live and work ... it is everywhere. Guillem Juan tries to discern in his work some of this: how concepts, like memory and representation, appear in human constructions, and how power dynamics are manifested through buildings.

Juan’s drawing shows chaotic spaces which are apparently ordered with this purpose: to pervert the established model of ground plan and elevation, and to question how we create living spaces with all the ideological determining factors that this work implies. The ability to imagine other contexts is already a kind of rebellion, a way of seeing things from another point of view. Thus, the works of Guillem mix places and non-places, real and fictional spaces, creating infinite possibilities. They fragment what it is already done and create something new that suggests new different ways. The architecture and its relationship to power can be subverted, or at least deconstructed, as the artist seems to suggest.

On the other hand, it is important to point out that Guillem decides to use the drawing for his works, and this is one of the most classic disciplines of art history; And why does he do it?, undoubtedly it is also a deconstructive exercise by disrupting the rules that the drawing has, since it is usually designed for sketches or photographs, for example. In his reflection on the architectures of power and their symbolism, Guillem also tackles the connection between elevation and ground plan, the architecture and the two-dimensional support of drawing and painting. And yet, there are certain Renaissance reminiscences as for the profuse interest in surveying and perspective, in order to represent the architecture through the mental map of its various forms; It is a revival brought to the present with the current social and historical connotations. In Guillem’s works, the look is fundamental. It makes us to interpret these almost abstract forms we see to give them a final meaning.

In a strict sense "Contraespacios" is quite political as it is not a mere representation, but a highly critical discourse with our Western thought. Therefore, it is important to know how a way of thinking works in order to find possible cracks that make us transform it, as Foucault suggested. Perhaps this is our only way out.

Guillem Juan’s exhibition is an opportunity to reread our context and our way of conceiving something as basic as our architecture, because this is, beyond its formal resolution in a building, a mental idea inherited of our time. An excellent work to understand that no discipline is subject to any other subjects and to understand that the drawing can be perfect for a critical and philosophical work. They are highly poetic and political pieces with which we can enjoy as for the visual concept and we can go beyond conceptualization. We can sneak into the cracks of Guillem Juan’s work to build new architectural utopias which exceed the imposed power.

Text by.- Semíramis González. Art criticism. Translation courtesy of Guillem Juan.