La Isla Taller

JUAN GOPAR: LA ISLA TALLER

January 25 – March 16

Álvaro Alcázar gallery opens on 25 January, La isla taller, by Juan Gopar, in which the artist from Lanzarote returns to Madrid with a large monographic exhibition, just 30 years after his last show in Madrid, at the Gamarra y Garrigues gallery. This is Gopar’s first solo exhibition in our gallery and with it he joins the list of represented artists. 

The exhibition presents a collection of paintings, sculptures and works on paper created on the island of Lanzarote between 1994 and 2021. These works not only reflect Gopar’s commitment to the art, culture and history of the islands, but also explore the unique intersection between his art and the objects found on the shores, washed up on the ocean currents. The juxtaposition in Gopar’s work between painting and these objects reveals forces of growth, shipwreck and catastrophe.

La Isla taller is constructed as a poetic ecosystem in which the real and the creative imagination intertwine their roots in a fascinating symbiosis. As happens with lichens, those organisms that arise from the collaboration between fungi and unicellular algae, and that from minimal units cover vast territories, Gopar’s work brings together the micro and the macro, from the insular shore to the enormous rooms of the cosmos. It is the greatness of the brief, so brilliantly expressed by Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Espacio. The duality of immensity and smallness, an eternal cycle of union and disunion that is always immobile towards the origin. This dynamic of opposites does nothing other than return to the idea that unity is born of duality, a principle that resonates in the ambiguous existence of painting, always suspended between inside and outside, between the eternal and the ephemeral, between its own materiality and the real. “The gods had no more substance than what I have. But here, in La isla taller, the “I” is none other than painting itself. In the huts entitled Metáforas – in Gopar these “architectures” must be understood as “liberated painting” – this idea appears in a very emphatic way: the form is embodied in its own signifier. Manuel Padorno says: “Mine is a beautiful workshop: the island”. 

Living thus reveals itself as an approach towards the centre, towards the stone: everything that happens takes place within a totality – place and time – which is at the same time our consciousness. What happens in us resonates in the spheres and what happens in the spheres vibrates in us. Our eyes are thus the eyes of the cosmos: the eyes with which the cosmos sees itself.What we see is thus the consciousness of the universe. In this rocking we find a dance of our own, the stamp of the rhythm that defines us: between the inner abode and the epicentre of our experience. In the series Walkabout (The Strokes of Song) the small joins the large in an endless resonance: the coloured surface is transformed into depth, it becomes a stellar mirror. The spectator is swayed by this rhythm that is both intimate and universal. A totality where each event, as in the lichen that embraces rocks and trees, flourishes and contributes to the richness of the whole.