Juan Nazar
Visiting a Stone
Exhibition from April 14th to April 30th, 2023
Just like a stone is a fragment of a rock that is made up of hundreds of smaller stones, VISITING A STONE deals with small findings, frames, or fragments of something that wishes to find its other part. That other part seems to be the artist’s desire to be completed with his history, his childhood, remembrances, and fragments of his memory.
The exhibition approaches concepts of territory and historic interpretation through different materialities, but also inserts itself in the subconscious of the artist himself, who takes inspiration from the German Romantic period, in which a fragment or a part of a ruin was regarded as a vestige of something that still remained unfinished.
Inside the Vorfluter exhibition space, located right in the middle of Neukölln, one can find suspended in the air an old geopolitical map of Germany, or rather, of a fragment of Brandenburg, the territory where the artist has lived for the past seven years. The canvas, exposed on both sides, has been intervened with graphic and pictorial elements, following its own folds and creases, like someone who explores and defines a route.
Fourteen pieces in A4 format, including seven paintings and seven prints made on graph paper, are placed in a line. Among these are drawings that seem to have no end and organic textures subjected to the measurements’ right angle.
In the same space, three photographs installed on plasterboard panels set up against the floor offer glimpses of something that is still in process, photographed objects whose circularity refers to a cycle that is always in movement and transformation.
From the lower level, one can hear the sounds of a video being projected inside an artifact articulated through the assemblage of two objects. The image shows a girl’s bare feet, and to one side, a doll’s feet. The camera is still, and the footage is in slow motion. Our gaze also stays on that small frame or visual fraction that we see when we walk and look at our feet on the ground. At the same time, we hear nothing but our own breathing and heartbeat.
To one side, and in the shadows, are two photographs that form a diptych. Taken at some beach in the south of Chile, black rocks seem to be submerged in what once was a river of lava. A heavy and mineral river where memories came to a standstill.
Juan Nazar, (Chile) studied architecture in Chile and Italy, after which he turned towards the development of visual arts. He refined this practice under the supervision of the artist Eugenio Dittborn, as well as by participating in art residencies in cities such as Lisbon and Berlin. His work consists in capturing objects and situations through photography, sketches, or cast molds, in order to then classify them and rearrange them in a new context. He studied different materials, exploring the relationship between architectonic landscape and its fragments in a determined place.
