RETURN-ETERNAL-RETURN
A walk within our inner self, where, by our own decision, we choose to board a boat without direction (or to be the boat itself) and lose ourselves adrift in the flow of becoming. We dare to journey without any plan other than to inhabit the body and trust in the listening to what it brings on the path it takes to meet itself.
This exhibition seeks to honor every “leaf step” of the inner jungle that inhabits us. To enter its dark light in the night and traverse sensitively the soul of that space inhabited by thousands of bodies and origins. I believe the artist’s journeys into the jungle, venturing through it by water, embracing the trees and the sounds of birds, allowed him to connect with the essential nature of that whole body and the singular-plural that inhabits it.
This work connects me more to a condition of time, which could be associated with its circular form. Nature brings us in its day-afternoon-night-day a mysterious repetition, like in the myth of eternal return (as mentioned by Mircea Eliade), making us return, never to the same place, always to a new one.
Juan Jose returns to the jungle and collects Paiche scales, different types of wood, liquid rubber from trees, a hand-carved boat, and the observation and listening to the animals that live there, placing them at the center of each piece so that in their combination with other materials, they tell the sounds of that "great whole," and how they resonate within his personal nature. All he intends is to imagine "natura" in its time, leading us to live what must be lived in its time. No more. Nothing more.
A return to the inner self, like diving into the lagoons or losing oneself in the silver surface shine of the jungle river that occurs in the afternoon, a surface that he contemplates as liminal between what is inside and outside. The liminal is a theme that has accompanied him in his latest series, like that space of transit, like the rituals we repeat each year, necessary spaces to rethink our internal time.
His questions about the time and space that inhabit us border on pre-Socratic and Socratic thought, making me reflect between the question: What is the world made of? And inquiries around: What is the place of humans within it? I walk through the series, and by divine grace, there is no answer, but rather an invitation to navigate and rediscover myself.
The works in this series reveal a binary that breaks, allowing emerging hybrid materials, bursts that are inevitably difficult to categorize, to name. An emergent that brings me back to a part of myself, center, and periphery that I observe and question, and with its lived elements, I mix them inside me to inhabit what other movement possibilities I have in my existence.
I’ve always thought that the way Juan Jose chooses his materials and works on his pieces is more like an alchemist’s workshop than a visual artist’s studio. The combinations of these materials he uses in his plastic art and how he brings his images to emerge beyond literal reality make me contemplate the care in the detail of each application. It's like a fine weave, where the thread is the material, and the needle is the artist's fingers-eyes. Meticulous care that gives a good place (I would say "honor") to what he wants to convey, seeking to respond to what has nurtured him. Returning in the same measure what was taken, what was learned. It is here where the boat runs aground.
Perhaps this is why the word “RETURN” resonates with me, a word formed by the Latin roots (re-again, and tornare-to turn), meaning the action and effect of giving something back to the one who had it before.
Fer Escudero
