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Interview with Juan López |
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| Juan López comes to the Santa Mònica with Para tu tara [‘Shrug Off Your Troubles’], a major installation loaded with references to the urban space that is also, and above all, a call for optimism. To mark this young artist’s first one-man show in Barcelona we met to talk and find out about his interests. |
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| Juan López. Photo:
Bruno Ochaita |
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DAVID G. TORRES
What does ‘Para tu Tara’, the phrase that is the title of the exhibition and also appears in the installation, actually mean?
That you should get rid of your problems, your alienations...
So it isn’t a dedication, ‘For you, Tara’, but an imperative.
Yes. It’s like saying ‘leave your worries behind you’. It appears as if on a billboard, as a poster with a message that aims to raise the spectator’s spirits. Phrases with upbeat imperatives are part of the work that I do on the street.
On the street!
I prepare walls and put up phrases of this kind. On walls that have been plastered with concert posters I do bas relief images with a box cutter; I cut out phrases and drawings, searching for layers and colours and bringing them to light. And I write encouraging messages along the lines of ‘have faith’.
Or ‘shrug off your troubles’.
This tara/troubles thing is also part
of a private language. It’s what a group of friends
and I call the ‘daft ideas’ that go through your
mind, your complexes or whatever. But tara has a
different meaning: it refers to a physical problem, or to
the weight of a truck, for example. So tara as a
word doesn’t mean exactly what I mean by it, but we
have adapted it to our vocabulary. And I think it’s
easy to catch on to the idea of tara as something
that troubles you.
It may be politically incorrect to talk about taras or defects, but the fact is it’s a slang word, used on the street, as urban as the posters you were talking about and the tiers of seats or the stickers in the installation.
The stickers have to do with the kind of intervention on the street that the billposting firms do, and at the same time it’s short-lived, which is something that I’m very interested in: I always work with ephemeral materials.
Why are you so interested in ephemeral materials?
It’s part of my interest in interventions on the street. I think that to intervene on the street you have to be lighter than the graffiti, for example: you shouldn’t insist to the point of tiring people’s eyes, and at times they don’t calculate how much weight it will have on a wall. One of the things that really annoy me about graffiti is that it lasts so long.
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And the fact that it has become conventional.
Yes, it has to do with everything that is generated when we talk about urban culture, graffiti, etcetera. I don’t like being related to all of this, but I always get linked to this issue. I relate to this kind of thing because these are the things I relate to and that’s that.
But the installation reconstructs an urban space and draws on this whole culture?
I take on board the fact that I use urban elements such as floodlights and streetlights or tiers of seating, and I draw on a whole urban culture that is my culture. My references are graffiti, stickers, posters, photocopies, fanzines and so on. All of this is present in the installations or drawings that I do, but not only this.
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You have set up scaffolding like one of these stands that they put up in parks: in any case, a space with an urban use. And there are megaphones drawn with adhesive tape coming out of this scaffolding that blare out slogans, and that is very far from real.
It’s very ‘Roger Rabbit’. My idea is to work on the exhibition space —in this case with real objects and urban motifs, but on another occasion it might be something else— and modify it. I’m interested in seeing how I can transform the space by means of the drawing and the objects.
You work with the space: the outdoor space when you work on the street and the space of the museum or art gallery when they ask you to do an exhibition.
Yes.
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The space you found yourself with at the Santa Mònica is a paradigm of the white room, and what’s more, it’s on the top floor, with big windows, high up like the artist’s famous glass dome.
At first, when I saw the empty space, the only thing I could think of was opening windows, I felt as if I was in a sports hall. And on the wall by the door, with the two columns, the first thing I visualized was an advertising poster. This was the central part of the project, the rest followed from there, with the tiered seating with its evocation of sports hall and as a complement to the billboard.
There’s also a video with a cleaning woman cleaning the space.
The first idea was to project it at life size in the room and complement it with drawings, which is pretty much like what I’ve done on other occasions, with a museum attendant, for example. But it didn’t work out. What I did do was to send out an invitation email with 15 seconds of video in which the cleaning woman washes the letters of ‘you are invited’ off the floor. Now, at the entrance to the exhibition, by way of welcome, she’s there washing the floor. It’s also a little tribute to the workers, of whom I’m one.
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The whole thing has quite a precarious feel, especially the adhesive tape, which is actually torn and peeling off in places.
I studied at the Faculty of Fine Art in Cuenca and the kind of work we were doing there was fairly punky, scrappy and crude. This has become almost a signature trait of our generation, even among the people who have more of a design orientation, for example.
What was your time at the Art School in Cuenca like?
Cuenca sets its stamp on you. I coincided there with a group of good people who are now working in music or design or photography, with whom I’ve kept in contact, and then we had Montesinos, Brea and Horacio Fernández among our tutors. In fact, the group of us who were at Cuenca run a Webzine (www.eroina-rgb.as) and we also work together on joint projects under the name of Zumo Natural.
Was that also the source of the urban aspect and, for example, the reference to graffiti that you were talking about?
What has happened is that all of these references are in vogue now.
And how do you see yourself as part of a fashion?
I haven’t stopped for four years, and I see that in a couple of years there might be a break, this will go out of fashion and cease to be interesting. Until this phenomenon comes to an end and I have new and different work that I’m keen to present and exhibit, I want to carry on doing what I’m doing now, like this installation in the Santa Mònica, but in a different way, for interior design, for example, or for lifestyle magazines. In end, I want to think about what I’m going to do when this phenomenon is over and, at the same time, I want to take advantage of it to sell, in art, in design or in fashion.
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Barcelona
After Cuenca and after being at the Injuve fair for young artists in Madrid, what brought you to Barcelona?
Botín gave me a grant and I asked to do a residence at Hangar. During that year I did bits and pieces, out of Barcelona, and then I got a call from Fede Montornés, who had met me at the Injuve, inviting me to do something at the Santa Mònica.
How do you see the city?
Very special and very closed in on itself. For all its European air, it’s very Spanish. And although I’ve been at Hangar, in these ten months I’ve made contact with very few people. This is an active city, there are things to see, life is good here, but it’s not at all easy to make a place for yourself and break into the circle of people who are doing interesting things. And my intention at the moment is to stay here. |
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And how do you see yourself? Twenty-six years old: Injuve, Casa Encendida, Botín and the Santa Mònica.
I’m delighted. I get very confused, and so when I was twenty-one I went to the doctor and she told me that my head was ten years older than the rest of me, but not to worry about it. And here I am!
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