Un posible jardín by Javier Peláez: at Casa Siza, curated by Christian Barragán
Similar to the Kleingärten in Berlin, which were built with the aim of having a refuge separate from the home to rest from the daily routine, the exhibition Un posible jardín [A Possible Garden] has been designed by Javier Peláez with the purpose of having an additional place to his studio in which he has, in his words, “the opportunity to assume [another] part of my nature”, and even more, a physical and mental place where the choice to paint flowers expresses “a shameless position in the face of my interest in the threatening beauty of poisonous flowers, which have at the same time the potential to heal and to make sick”.
Indeed, Un posible jardín represents another shore in Peláez’s career where the proximity and distance of the same concern come together: flowers have been present in his work for more than ten years, although they have received modest attention. Whether in a hyperrealistic, gestural or abstract form, flowers have been a constant through which Peláez has explored and expanded the margins of his practice, as demonstrated by the series Fake Flowers (2012), Flores explotadas (2020) and Flores venenosas (2020). With this new facet, the artist also ventures into a political, economic and social terrain of transcendental impact, since behind several floral species included in this exhibition, there is an opaque story about their cultivation, trade and consumption.
Faced with this otherness, Peláez has opted for a painting that delves into “the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, between the digital and the analogue”, and has continued to work with toxic flowers used in medicine, in rituals and as recreational drugs that possess a duality of beauty and threat. Some examples of this botanical museum are the lily (a specimen around which Peláez developed the Blue Lotus exhibition at Saenger Galería during 2023), the black iris, the lady of the night, the chrysanthemum, the azalea, the daturas and the poppy, a species from which medicines such as morphine and codeine are produced, or high-risk drugs such as heroin and opium gum. With this same plant, the poppy oil that Peláez uses in the varnish of his paintings is also produced.
Added to these interests in which art, botany, pharmacology and the study of daily life coincide, Un posible jardín, presents a new set of works derived from previous explorations that is distinguished by a fragmentary and modular, hyperrealistic and “blurred vision” pictorial treatment, with divided or superimposed screens. Another quality of this collection of pictorial approximations is the use of grisaille, a technique that Pelaéz employs to achieve greater veracity using chiaroscuro and gradations of a single colour.
It is precisely this strategy and this purpose, together with the iconographic use of photography and memories as the base material in the configuration of the painting, an approach that Pelaéz shares at present with the Basque artist Alain Urrutia (Bilbao, 1981), whose work is part of this exhibition in a mirror gesture to that which occurred a few months ago in this same space, when Urrutia's exhibition housed a work by Peláez, thus establishing a correlation between the practice of one and the other.
In this timeless narrative, the only human figure present in this vegetal fiction stands out in Urrutia's painting: a place with the potential of a refuge to escape from the current noise of the world and at the same time settle in it, even if momentarily, in a different way. After all, Fabio Morábito wrote in his account of Berlin's Kleingärten, a “garden is an experience of incessant restraint and correction.” This pictorial garden is also the same for Javier Peláez.
— Christian Barragán
