Put on Your Body
18 Apr - 06 Sep 2015
PUT ON YOUR BODY
18 April - 6 September 2015: Hall 3
Curatorship: Manuel Olveira
Coordination: Eneas Bernal
Javier Codesal (Sabiñánigo, Huesca, 1958) is one of Spain’s most accomplished practitioners, having forged a personal vernacular based on the use of video and space within the framework of an audiovisual tradition rooted in the archaeological, the local or folklore. His work cuts across a breadth of different subjects: the passing of time, memory, lack of communication, loss and death, reality and desire, the construction of the image and its almost physical relationship with time, the cinematic and its potential formulations in the present day, the relationship between the word and the image, song and orality and, broadly speaking, an updating of portraiture.
Connecting the varied subject matters underpinning Codesal’s extensive production, one finds a special focus on the body as both a manifestation of and a channel for the being, over and above any illustration of the signature individualism or cult of personality of our times. Thus, Codesal comments on identity, pain and jouissance, pleasure and illness, at times addressing them head-on while other times taking a more ethereal approach. The bodies captured by his lens appear to the beholder as enigmas begging for attention. For this artist, each body is a text that can speak for itself, and those on display in this exhibition speak to wholly human and ineffable concerns: existence, desire, love, beauty, communication, knowledge, loss, forlornness, fragility, illness and death.
The exhibition borrows its title from a line in the poem Los desgraciados [The Miserable] by César Vallejo; Put on Your Body is, at once, a mandate, an invitation and a suggestion. In the exhibition, the bodyclaims the attention it deserves. It stands up and faces the beholder tospeak, overcoming obstacles, modesty, and diffidence. Of the works on display the oldest is Sábado legionario (1988), a piecewhere the individuality of the young body is absorbed into the mass.
His most recent work is Ponte el cuerpo (2015), produced expressly for the show t the MUSAC and consisting of a suite of photographs centred on the body of a model the artist meets repeatedly in a hotel, who he observes, analyses and approaches with his camera and who ends up as the perfect pretext to take pleasure in contemplation and the pain of knowledge. Between those two works are the manifold bodies that appear throughout the artist’s practice: the machine-body (Sábado legionario, 1988), the body of pleasure (Centauro, 1988), the body of pain (Tras la piel, 1996), the body in need (Fábula a destiempo, 1996), the body of desire (Estudio, 2002), fantasy (Fábula del hombre amado, 1999), the body of loss (Feliz humo, 2006), communication and lack of communication (Inmóviles, 1999), and the body of death and absence (Días de sida, 1989).
Many of the aforementioned works explore fragility, death, illness, and more specifically HIV infection. This is the case of Días de sida (1989- 1996) and Tras la piel (1995), metaphorically showing the effects of the illness on the body and the sense of loss in the face of imminent disappearance, but above all they comment on eroticism, beauty and care. Codesal was one of the first Spanish artists to lend visibility to this pandemic, focusing on it in his one-person exhibition Días de sida (Galería XXI, Madrid, 1993) and also in Sida, pronunciamento e acción, curated by Juan de Nieves (Pazo de Fonseca, Santiago de Compostela, 1994).
The artist’s attention to the body at the peak of its splendour and in its extreme frailness is matched by an attention to specificity, physicity or reality that has little to do with realism or documentary naturalism. Divested of any aesthetisation, Codesal’s irreconcilable tension with the real —and consequently, the spectators with reality— is produced with a personal, internal and almost intimate rationale. The camera is the device and the excuse that enables a rapprochement, tapping into the pace of life and reality. That is why, for Codesal, the intimate and the familiar occupy a key place, though without ever being invasive or obvious.
18 April - 6 September 2015: Hall 3
Curatorship: Manuel Olveira
Coordination: Eneas Bernal
Javier Codesal (Sabiñánigo, Huesca, 1958) is one of Spain’s most accomplished practitioners, having forged a personal vernacular based on the use of video and space within the framework of an audiovisual tradition rooted in the archaeological, the local or folklore. His work cuts across a breadth of different subjects: the passing of time, memory, lack of communication, loss and death, reality and desire, the construction of the image and its almost physical relationship with time, the cinematic and its potential formulations in the present day, the relationship between the word and the image, song and orality and, broadly speaking, an updating of portraiture.
Connecting the varied subject matters underpinning Codesal’s extensive production, one finds a special focus on the body as both a manifestation of and a channel for the being, over and above any illustration of the signature individualism or cult of personality of our times. Thus, Codesal comments on identity, pain and jouissance, pleasure and illness, at times addressing them head-on while other times taking a more ethereal approach. The bodies captured by his lens appear to the beholder as enigmas begging for attention. For this artist, each body is a text that can speak for itself, and those on display in this exhibition speak to wholly human and ineffable concerns: existence, desire, love, beauty, communication, knowledge, loss, forlornness, fragility, illness and death.
The exhibition borrows its title from a line in the poem Los desgraciados [The Miserable] by César Vallejo; Put on Your Body is, at once, a mandate, an invitation and a suggestion. In the exhibition, the bodyclaims the attention it deserves. It stands up and faces the beholder tospeak, overcoming obstacles, modesty, and diffidence. Of the works on display the oldest is Sábado legionario (1988), a piecewhere the individuality of the young body is absorbed into the mass.
His most recent work is Ponte el cuerpo (2015), produced expressly for the show t the MUSAC and consisting of a suite of photographs centred on the body of a model the artist meets repeatedly in a hotel, who he observes, analyses and approaches with his camera and who ends up as the perfect pretext to take pleasure in contemplation and the pain of knowledge. Between those two works are the manifold bodies that appear throughout the artist’s practice: the machine-body (Sábado legionario, 1988), the body of pleasure (Centauro, 1988), the body of pain (Tras la piel, 1996), the body in need (Fábula a destiempo, 1996), the body of desire (Estudio, 2002), fantasy (Fábula del hombre amado, 1999), the body of loss (Feliz humo, 2006), communication and lack of communication (Inmóviles, 1999), and the body of death and absence (Días de sida, 1989).
Many of the aforementioned works explore fragility, death, illness, and more specifically HIV infection. This is the case of Días de sida (1989- 1996) and Tras la piel (1995), metaphorically showing the effects of the illness on the body and the sense of loss in the face of imminent disappearance, but above all they comment on eroticism, beauty and care. Codesal was one of the first Spanish artists to lend visibility to this pandemic, focusing on it in his one-person exhibition Días de sida (Galería XXI, Madrid, 1993) and also in Sida, pronunciamento e acción, curated by Juan de Nieves (Pazo de Fonseca, Santiago de Compostela, 1994).
The artist’s attention to the body at the peak of its splendour and in its extreme frailness is matched by an attention to specificity, physicity or reality that has little to do with realism or documentary naturalism. Divested of any aesthetisation, Codesal’s irreconcilable tension with the real —and consequently, the spectators with reality— is produced with a personal, internal and almost intimate rationale. The camera is the device and the excuse that enables a rapprochement, tapping into the pace of life and reality. That is why, for Codesal, the intimate and the familiar occupy a key place, though without ever being invasive or obvious.