Museu de l’Empordà, April – May 2017
Artists:
Aïda Andrés Rodrigálvarez, Adrian Espinós Ferrero, Anna Ill Albà, Jennifer Owens, Esther Pí Gómez, Mònica Planes Castan,
Ignasi Prat Altimira, Ines Schaikowski.
Coordinator:
Mario Pasqualotto
Mario Pasqualotto, born in Barcelona in 1953, is an artist with wide-ranging interests: his creative activity encompasses many different fields of the plastic arts, including installations-performances-environments, sculpture, sculpture-painting, jewellery and the graphic arts. He is the President of the Jury for the JCE Biennale in the city of Figueres.
The city of Figueres consolidates its presence in this European itinerant cultural project, fostering and giving support to the youngest Catalan talents in the visual arts who are seeking international projection, and at the same time visualising the conceptual and plastic interests of these young creators who have been trained in educational centres, universities and art schools.
In this edition, there is a notable presence of female artists. Six of the eight selected creators are women, since most of the proposals and dossiers presented were by female artists. But both women and men, even though they do not represent an entirely new generational plastic art movement, do bring us closer to a more generic vision of the interests, conflicts and tensions that generate their everyday personal lives, marked with a profound politicoemotional background between the personal world and the reality that surrounds it. These are young artists who are living today’s convulsive times, based on precarious subsistence economies and persistent personal recycling, both emotional and material, on which basis they shape their most intimate experiences and emotions.
In the previous edition, the jury saw that the projects reflected the socio-political situation of profound crisis and discouraging realities existing for a large part of the public, particularly the younger generations, who displayed powerful visual proposals with irony and acuteness.
This year, there is a clear and widespread tendency to probe deeper into the dreamlike, metaphorical and evocative worlds of real or imaginary spaces – sacralised everyday objects – as a form of rejection of the tangible mediocrity that surrounds us, and the need to cast off weight and defend their own dreams, protecting themselves with reflection and thought, the capacity to imagine and to build bridges towards another possible parallel future as creators, and towards Utopias as NON-places/spaces.
From Figueres (Catalonia), the artists selected by the jury of this edition of the Biennial are: Aida Andrés Rodrigálvarez, Adrián Espinós, Anna Ill, Jennifer Owens, Esther Pi Gómez, Mònica Planes, Ignasi Prat and Inés Schaikowski.
All of them propose their particular plastic visions, which, from the moment they are displayed outside of their studios to the viewing public, come to form part of the observers’ memory and grant them the privilege of being able to dream and create their own aesthetic-mental worlds which, paradoxically, do not necessarily coincide with the artist’s motivations and wishes. The entire experience leads us into a greater awareness of human diversity.
Mario Pasqualotto