Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

ADN, DNI, DINERO (Serie) [DNA, ID, MONEY (Series)]

Image caption
JAVIER BALDEÓN

ADN, DNI, DINERO (Serie) [DNA, ID, MONEY (Series)]  Serie

  • 1995
  • Chromogenic print on paper (4 copies in Collection)
  • 100 x 80 cm each
  • Cat. F_S_3
  • Acquired in 1997
By:
Frederic Montornés

Javier Baldeón learned his craft at the School of Fine Arts in Valencia. Following his first solo exhibition in the mid 1980s his work settled somewhere between investigation and evocation, as he minimised the expressive resources that he used and focused on the tactile qualities of painting. In his photos he focused on the practical resolution of the medium and its differences with other techniques, seeking to produce images that were paradigms of what photography should be. With his focus partly on painting and partly on photography, or partly on questioning simulation and partly on the reality of pictorial representation, Javier Baldeón spent some time in New York and subsequently came to concentrate on the actual processes involved in his work, the use of new materials and chance physical and chemical reactions. His most characteristic pieces are those that he produced with synthetic resins in the 1980s and 1990s. Creating light and shade effects from inside his works, as if they were dioramas, he underscores the vagueness of representation. Drawn by the potential of photography for manipulating reality, in the mid 90s he began to focus on the systems that institutionalise the submission of the individual to social norms. This led him to create a series of photos based on money, ID cards and passports that highlight our subordination to the structure of a system that controls everything from our genetic code to our national identity, i.e. everything that makes us legally someone. In that series he uses repetition and reproducibility to reflect on randomness, causality and chance.

Frederic Montornés

 
By:
Frederic Montornés
Javier Baldeón
Ciudad Real 1960

Javier Baldeón began his studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Polytechnic University of Valencia in 1979. From 1987 to 1989 he held a residency at Casa Velázquez in Madrid under a grant from Valencia City Council. In 1998 he obtained a PhD from the University of Castilla-La Mancha. He currently works as a lecturer at the Department of Art and as Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Castilla-La Mancha's campus in Cuenca.

His work is essentially abstract in nature. He shies away from representative art and strives to find expressiveness through colour. During his residency at Casa Velázquez in the late 1980s his work began to be characterised by subtle silhouettes sketched onto bright, flat, enamelled surfaces, with great simplicity in colour and shape.  He introduces emotion into his apparently rational, somewhat rigid works through clever variations that seek to challenge the limits between the organic and the geometrical. He uses repetition and reproducibility to reflect on randomness, causality and chance.

The first solo exhibition of his work took place at the Fúcares Gallery in Almagro in 1984, when he was still a student. Since then his art has appeared in collective exhibitions at the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art (Madrid, 1988), the Institute of Modern Art of Valencia (Valencia, 1988), the Fondation Cartier (Paris, 1990-1991), the Santa Mónica Art Centre (Barcelona, 1992), the Reina Sofía Museum (Madrid, 1994), the Wilfredo Lam Centre (Havana, 1995), the La Caixa Foundation (Madrid, 1997) and the Domus Artium (Salamanca, 2017). His most prominent solo exhibition is that staged at the Pedro Oliveira Gallery (Porto, Portugal, 1999).

Frederic Montornés