Javier de Juan at Max Estrella

The sea is the subject of Spanish painter Javier de Juan's series of 10 large oils (the smallest is 65 by 77 inches, the largest 77 by 195 inches), called collectively "Instantes Congelados" (Frozen Moments). De Juan emerged in the mid 1980s in the wake of Madrid's culturally effervescent movida, and his work exemplifies to some extent the urbane irony of the era. His paintings, prints and drawings, often depicting well-dressed young couples, travelers and landscapes, capture in an expressionist mode a certain languorous melancholy, equal parts noir sensuality and modern cool.

These new paintings (all works 2004) have nothing in common with traditional seascapes, instead focusing in close on wave forms and the surface detail of seawater. At first they seem crude and cartoon-like, arch and superficial. But a more careful look reveals the turgid dynamism of his painterly surfaces, with their exaggerated highlights and shadows, their buttery peaks and valleys, and saturated colors, from the gelid blues and whites of 1st Third of Eternity to the psychedelic yellows and greens of Names of Days or the nearly violent violets of Portrait of Carlos V. They may begin with a kind of mannered expressionism, but the result is a monumentality that parodies the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich without abandoning a certain loftiness, as though the irony were as transparent as the sea itself, and the painted surface an emblem for depth. They seem to declare that these are painting's truths, not the sea's.

The top sixth of each canvas is reserved for various scrawled texts, from the names of all the world's seas (NNE) and references to classical mythology (Giants, Perseus), to the names of days in various languages. When de Juan scribbles across the top of 1st Third of Eternity a Spanish passage that translates as "Nothing's so small that it doesn't leave a trace and nothing so large that it doesn't end by disappearing," he could be describing his own approach. This is the sea as blank slate, upon which first the artist, then the viewer, inscribes historical or mythological referents. It is nature as seen through a scrim of culture, the ocean as we might dream or imagine it. For all his humor and allegorical overlays, de Juan engages the viewer through his expert manipulation of volume and hue. The results add up to an almost Melvillian sublimity.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group