Juan Luis Moraza – republic for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
15/oct/2014 - 02/mar/2015
republic is an exhibition by Juan Luis Moraza (Vitoria, 1960), assembling a broad selection of his works and structuring them in areas that examine the museum as a system of conventions and possibilities of citizenship. If one of the problems of contemporary democracy is the dilemma facing each citizen – between passivity and the possibilities of participation in social life – in the museum Moraza finds a space of convergence between the citizen-artist and citizen-spectator. Yet for the artist the public issue is not merely political, it is also anthropological and concerns the constitution of subjectivity itself.
Moraza has always constructed, in a mutual interaction with his artistic output, a conceptual discourse, where language and ideas also denote a place inhabited by the artist, along with the forms and characteristics of objects and situations put forward in each project. Thus, Moraza’s museum will be his republic, a space of interpretation and transformation understood as a system of participation. His work and the present exhibition explore the crisis of representation, be it in the individual or in society, questioned as representation and represencialidad; the artist proposes a place that is transformed into a system of “implexities”, a term he uses to designate the crossroads between complexity and implication, between the rights and responsibilities of the social interplay taken up by the museum.
The works on display and the themes and problems addressed portray the Museo as a Museum of Participation (where the citizen-spectator will find, for instance, ballot boxes, opinion polls on the ideal artist or a unique proposal for the use of taxes…), as a Symbolic Museum (where the notion and uses of the monument in art, social life and everyday life are examined), a Demographic Museum (with an awareness that demographics have always essentially been a political and cultural issue that has redefined diverse periods in the history of humanity) and as an Anthropic Museum (the expression of desire and the vindication of the body as the constitution of the individual, reformulated as the “dividual” in the artist’s expression; in other words, “divided , both because of internal fractures and external fractures in the universe of relations”.
In Moraza’s republic art is also a process of critical reflection on the dilemmas of the ornament (with all conflictive and marginal representations in the social and cultural structure) and the monument as an expression of authority in public space. This will pose another challenge to the spectator’s interpretation, with constant questions raised on their journey around the exhibition, within the context of its “interpassivity”, and will be an invitation to discover the “republican museum” of an artist that has always taken up a clear stance in the open dispute between the Baroque and Classicism, decisively opting for the libertarian possibilities of Baroque as opposed to the puritan alienation of all formal, artistic and political purification.
Texto: http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/juan-luis-moraza
For more information about Juan Luis Moraza works: galeria@espaciominimo.es
