It all happens at home, indoor. When you get in, you take off your coat, leave the things. You lower the guard, the strength falls down. And time is more still and there are mirrors, and the night falls, too. It is then, here inside, when the soul expands for a bit and you start glimpsing, again, the fears you have been switching off during the day. The uncertain, unruly mental zones that you try to escape.
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A fountain that seeks a river is the first solo show by Javier Chozas at Chalton Gallery. Here, the artist presents a series of new-made sculptures that inhabit this instant of sudden and permanent fragility. The exhibition parts from a reflection on social rejection, the fear that this provokes in us, and the effects of this fear in our internal landscape. Plaster, látex, and steel materialize this impact in small and connected cores, giving life to elements of a broken story that we’re invited to reset.
Javier Chozas . Words I dont want to say, 2019 . 60x40x110
Expanded throughout the two gallery rooms, the set of works reverberates in their physical presence just as much as in the invisible fluencies that affect and shape their bodies. Each piece has its own strength and, at the same time, coexists with the rest in the same continuum plane, in a new autonomous universe. Javier Chozas has the strange and unique capacity to insert emotional qualities in the materials until they spin inside and with them, almost becoming palpable. Avoiding the figurative, his production translates a complex psychological maze into the plastic language of scratches, folds, of exact and alive imperfections.
Possibly more intrigued by the process of digging deeper than by the wish to reach conclusions, Javier Chozas’ work carries out a constant, deep, and radical exploration of some hidden parcels of the human identity. Chozas’ incessantly works and confronts the materials as if he had found a secret passage through this fog, and as if he could discover, across it, an authentic parcel of our emotional skeleton. And magically, bring it to life, turn it physical.
In line with the processes and interests of his practice, A fountain that seeks a river does not pursue a univocal representation of the human body or psyche, but the generation of a stage device, full of potential, where these emotional energies are actualized and come forward to be transited, escaped, perhaps touched.
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Exhibition from Feb. 13th to 23rd