Jaime de la Jara
05 May - 19 Jun 2010
JAIME DE LA JARA
"The Navel"
May. 06, 2010 / Jun. 19, 2010
Jaime de la Jara presents in this exhibition entitled The Navel (El ombligo) some of his recent works, carrying on with his inquiry into the interpretation of reality and its facets of fiction and forgery, as well as its “mistakes”.
These works appear all together under the title The Navel, which comes from the sentence "The man without a Navel yet lives in me" written by Sir Thomas Browne in his Religio Medici in 1642. Sir Thomas Browne considered that human beings committed mistakes (sins) and that these were licit; he understood it thus since, being a Catholic, he believed himself a descendant of he who was the first in committing a mistake, Adam. In another of his books, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or, Enquiries into Very Many Received Tenets and Commonly Presumed Truths, Sir Thomas Browne developed an index on the prevalence of false beliefs and vulgar errors. Jaime de la Jara uses this as a starting point and a metaphor, applying it to contemporary circumstances and objects so as to produce a personal outline, and to pose some issues. His intent is not to explain them, but to disquiet, using ambiguity and de-contextualization as tools in his search for metaphors for “navels” in today’s circumstances.
Jaime de la Jara shows part of the result of his work in the last two years, that have yielded a series of objects, reproductions of daily elements, characterized for going unnoticed, while they are really of great importance.
In the first place, he presents a series of pieces called “Keys”. They are what their name means: keys, electrical switches reproduced and transformed into “important” elements through their deformation and that, cast in metal, acquire a new meaning and import. Being Eve’s “descendants”, we come from she who was a woman without a navel. She is the representation of the creature that should not have committed the mistake, and lacked a navel. Joyce in Ulysses mentions this, and Jaime de la Jara reproduces the disappearance of the object as a metaphor for the exclusion of any possible mistake, searching for the disappearance of the scar left by the misunderstanding.
Another piece is the video projection of one of those keys in its process towards deformity until its disappearance. Next to it a photograph of another piece is shown –reproduced in large format, it aims to transgress still further its concept and repeat again the circumstance that he uses to heed the mistakes of his surroundings.
The series “Flags” recreates three radiators built in wood and plaster, which are placed at the height of the viewer’s face. They are pieces that, gathered in the same space, interact and compose an installation that, in turn, transforms space. They also come from transgressing the element and its relationship with both the environs and the individual, but also from a poem by a Mexican author who explained what the function of the “Flag” should be: an element to expound the needs of a people so as to make them clear and obvious and they should not have to be repeated anymore.
In the final space of the gallery, we find the installation Radiant 1: a big diorama of the fragment of an empty space. Apparently, there is nothing in it, but it contains the recreation of a floor radiator. Here Jaime de la Jara refers us to his interest in emptiness, nothingness, objects and, as Heidegger proposed, their conjugations as verbs.
Jaime de la Jara (Madrid, 1972) has recently set up exhibitions at the project room La Capilla, in the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, at Barcelona’s art centre Tecla Sala – as part of the programme of Les Reencontres Internacionales in the Pompidou, Paris, too – and, this April, in the Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía with his video Reality (show). He has received awards from different institutions, such as Caja Madrid in its 2005 and 2006 contest Generations, last year’s Creation Award from the Community of Madrid, and a grant from the Foundation Marcelino Botín in the 2003 edition of its grant programme bid. He has now an exhibition in Madrid’s Fúcares Gallery, who represents him, and where we already saw his work in 2007 with his exhibition 15 inches.
"The Navel"
May. 06, 2010 / Jun. 19, 2010
Jaime de la Jara presents in this exhibition entitled The Navel (El ombligo) some of his recent works, carrying on with his inquiry into the interpretation of reality and its facets of fiction and forgery, as well as its “mistakes”.
These works appear all together under the title The Navel, which comes from the sentence "The man without a Navel yet lives in me" written by Sir Thomas Browne in his Religio Medici in 1642. Sir Thomas Browne considered that human beings committed mistakes (sins) and that these were licit; he understood it thus since, being a Catholic, he believed himself a descendant of he who was the first in committing a mistake, Adam. In another of his books, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or, Enquiries into Very Many Received Tenets and Commonly Presumed Truths, Sir Thomas Browne developed an index on the prevalence of false beliefs and vulgar errors. Jaime de la Jara uses this as a starting point and a metaphor, applying it to contemporary circumstances and objects so as to produce a personal outline, and to pose some issues. His intent is not to explain them, but to disquiet, using ambiguity and de-contextualization as tools in his search for metaphors for “navels” in today’s circumstances.
Jaime de la Jara shows part of the result of his work in the last two years, that have yielded a series of objects, reproductions of daily elements, characterized for going unnoticed, while they are really of great importance.
In the first place, he presents a series of pieces called “Keys”. They are what their name means: keys, electrical switches reproduced and transformed into “important” elements through their deformation and that, cast in metal, acquire a new meaning and import. Being Eve’s “descendants”, we come from she who was a woman without a navel. She is the representation of the creature that should not have committed the mistake, and lacked a navel. Joyce in Ulysses mentions this, and Jaime de la Jara reproduces the disappearance of the object as a metaphor for the exclusion of any possible mistake, searching for the disappearance of the scar left by the misunderstanding.
Another piece is the video projection of one of those keys in its process towards deformity until its disappearance. Next to it a photograph of another piece is shown –reproduced in large format, it aims to transgress still further its concept and repeat again the circumstance that he uses to heed the mistakes of his surroundings.
The series “Flags” recreates three radiators built in wood and plaster, which are placed at the height of the viewer’s face. They are pieces that, gathered in the same space, interact and compose an installation that, in turn, transforms space. They also come from transgressing the element and its relationship with both the environs and the individual, but also from a poem by a Mexican author who explained what the function of the “Flag” should be: an element to expound the needs of a people so as to make them clear and obvious and they should not have to be repeated anymore.
In the final space of the gallery, we find the installation Radiant 1: a big diorama of the fragment of an empty space. Apparently, there is nothing in it, but it contains the recreation of a floor radiator. Here Jaime de la Jara refers us to his interest in emptiness, nothingness, objects and, as Heidegger proposed, their conjugations as verbs.
Jaime de la Jara (Madrid, 1972) has recently set up exhibitions at the project room La Capilla, in the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, at Barcelona’s art centre Tecla Sala – as part of the programme of Les Reencontres Internacionales in the Pompidou, Paris, too – and, this April, in the Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía with his video Reality (show). He has received awards from different institutions, such as Caja Madrid in its 2005 and 2006 contest Generations, last year’s Creation Award from the Community of Madrid, and a grant from the Foundation Marcelino Botín in the 2003 edition of its grant programme bid. He has now an exhibition in Madrid’s Fúcares Gallery, who represents him, and where we already saw his work in 2007 with his exhibition 15 inches.