ART Critic
by Dores Sacquegna PrimoPianoGallery · ITALY·
Xavi de Juan-Creix \ Multidisciplinary artist in Cap de Creus/
The word “anthroposophy”, from greek ànthropos = man, and sophìa = Knowledge, is a term used for the first time by the philosopher Robert Zimmerman and later by Rudolf Steiner to indicate the spiritual and philosophical path and the growth and inner development.
It proposes the investigation and the description of those spiritual phenomena by observing the soul of the scientific world and beyond. And this inner quest that leads Xavi de Juan-Creix to investigate the world where he lives in, looking the amenities and symbols to make sense of things, making us participate in his visions.
Portrait of a visionary artist
It is not easy to classify with a single term the art of the Cata-lan artist Xavi de Juan- Creix. His work is so rich in artistic, an-thropological, symbolic, conceptual references. Through photography, music, video art and poetry, he gives us the world as it is, in all its facets, in its uncertainties and illusions.
As in a mirror maze, our artist-warrior, explore the world, bringing out archetypes and mythographies, overlapping to the thoughts, words, feelings
that he every day brings with it, in its wealth of experience and meetings .
A traveling poet, with an energy ready to explode at any place he suspected or imagined.
During his journey of wandering poet, he recognize and meets himself in chaos (forces of nature) and the order (ability to analyze, to select, to program). Between one and the other, the process of purification that leads him to discover his own identity in a thousand alter ego.
The experience of light, divine or earthly is at the center of all his work. A light shade contrasts, highlighting the two opposite poles without separation.
The one meets the other and nothing is excluded. Good and evil. Positive and negative. Being and not being. No opposition but conjunction, union, which is also the synonym of identity of human being, of his otherness and of the Anthropos.
Starting point is the relationship between nature and God and then continue on human experience and so on man-environment looking for a deep and mysterious self, divided between good and evil, between past worlds and current reality, also between myth and modernity and between tradition and innovation.
The historical context and the machine to create.
Analyzing his work, I find references in the art of the historical avant-garde, in the unconventional heroes of Jean Genet, in the poets of the beat generation, in the figures that populate the works of Antonin Artaud and Samuel Beckett, in the underground culture of films and experimental music.
Artists such as John Cage, Gerhard Ruhm, Pierre Henry, Fluxus, Independent Group, Raymond Hains, may have contributed to the artistic imaginary of Xavi de Juan-Creix.
Artists, that with their experiences have crossed the boundaries of the different disciplines, helping to popularize the model of an alternative and spectacular culture, intrinsically linked to the nature of the work and to the vision of the viewer.
However, in his collages and photographic assemblages there are references to Dadaism, Surrealism and Pop Art, which we can find in his textures and he blend in particular tableau vivant, photography, cinema, theater, music, architecture in favor of a new aesthetic the city and the society of the spectacle, the media, and the advertising.
Heroes and anti-heroes take turns in the artworks of Xavi, proposing a vision that goes beyond the neo-Dadaist legacy and enhanced by a theoretical and conceptual dimension, where the narrative is combined with the new realism, a term coined by the French critic Pierre Restany.
All these artistic practices and also the introduction of light, we can find as antipodes in the Idealism and in American and European Romanticism, with a strong spiritual, fantastic, radical affiliation. What Restany recognized in these practices and these artists is that they "explore new ways of perception of reality", both from an artistic and intellectual points of view.
Powered by this imagery that brings the history of art and the life, Xavi de Juan-Creix, creates a new mechanics of drama: a total theater where all project stages the simulacrum of his inner poetry that distinguishes him from his contemporaries. One form of traveling from the inside to the outside,
which runs through the popular culture of the consumer society, of the voyeurism, of the cinemascope and technicolor, overcoming physical barriers and exploring the virtual world, like a traveler who sails in the time through a fiction machine, floating between past and present, between illusions and certainties.
In his cultural Olympus, the artist alternating real life and fiction, creativity and madness, method and technology, states of bliss and fear, thereby generating a three-dimensional and cross view that brings all of his work.
An imaginative fast food where as a chef he skillfully manages and mixing scents, smells, sounds, sensations, images, creating unique works that stand for concepts and narration.
In his work the invisible is visible; the truth emerges from the light as in a Renaissance painting. The light itself is photosynthesis of wonder, even when the battle of nature and by four elements seem to return the terrific aspect of the world.
Xavi is the warrior, the alchemical traveler, because he blends the ancient world with the present day, the mythological with the contemporary, the psychic with technology unconscious, metabolizing and centrifuging portions of daily life with arcane and pagan symbols, in search of a new man, of the super hero.
On this philosophical and spiritual path, we are also voyeur, because we cross the seas of knowledge to land on unknown beaches, where his camera explores the interstices, poking in the dust of time. His journey becomes our journey. A kind face-to-face with the deepest emotions, with our fears and anxieties, with our hopes, with our past and our future as well.
There are works such as “Bio Project” and “L'home Univers” realized in Cap de Creus, or “Lanzarote Organic”, which transmit the silence and the gale, the wind and the loneliness, the water that feeds and regenerates us; in this step of inner purification, we recognize our human and divine nature in the space and in the time, in that unknown dimension of research of sublime order after the organic chaos of the subconscious.
Works that speak to the world about the world itself and who have the capacity for introspection to reveal the magic that surrounds us through his eyes.
Textures and photo-collages that summarize his research, some examples are: the "Colages Celestes" (2006); “La caida de los grandes hombres" (2007); "Body Rock Structures" (2008),
"Introspectiva de un sueño" (2008); "Rebirth" (2007-2009); up to video projects that combine photography, art in movement, sound, poetry, storytelling and including the project as "Reorden" (2009-2010), which focuses on the creative process about "RE".
Indeed for visual artists, the creative chaos is a therapy to organize and rearrange their lives. In his works, the term “RE” is not only the noun of the verb, but rapresent conceptually the human being or the hero who that challenge the sky or divine punishment, the warrior-king who by his inner strength can overcome adversity of life.
Other interesting works are the video-poems as the "Cueva de los Verdes” (2010); “Rénovés” (2010); “Kidoku” (2010); “El Encarnador de Sueños” (2009); “Pino-Poesia” (2009),
and "The Gilgamesh Project" (2004-2008), this is a research on the evolution of the story starting from the ancient text from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which tells the Odyssey by Mesopotamian King Gilgamesh.
The project was presented in several international exhibitions, is a way of telling the story with a new aesthetic, merging past and present with a personal reinterpretation that is enriched every day, thanks to the institutional and cultural collaborations and also with artists and collaborators who participate there.
Finally, the Catalan artist is busy to dissecting the sensible things of human being in today's society, exploring as a wandering traveler throughout the history of art that basically is the history of humanity, capturing in his photographic lens, landscapes and passages from the invisible world to the visible world.
Mythical places where poets, writers, artists of all ages have left a trail of their journey on Earth..