JOAN CORTÉS

Of the sculptors working in the Balearic Islands, Joan Cortés (born in Pollença, Mallorca in 1964) is possibly the best known and also has one of the most distinctive sculptural languages. He has returned to the historical origins of the Aljub with Memòria de l’aigua (Water's Memory), a sculpture-installation specially created for this space in the Es Baluard Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Palma. It prompts a dialogue between the antiquity of the ancient reservoir and a work of art that transpires absolute contemporaneity.

In Memòria de l’aigua, the material, the colour, the form and the composition contribute to the description of the sculpture that Joan Cortés has been working on for the past two decades: the delicateness that is manifest not only in the treatment of the pieces that make up the work, but also in the way some of the forms have of embracing the others to create new forms and to make us feel the combined vibration; the fragility, as a characteristic, not so much physical, but of feelings; it gives a very particular feeling of accumulation, an accumulation that has nothing to do with Barroquism, but rather with maximum purification, the minimum amount of gestures, the essential elements. It is the diversity that repetition can offer when the artist has a command over the codes of composition, and the lightness of that which appears to be weightless, of that which offers the sensation of separating itself from the earth and rising, as the things of the soul or the things that emerge from the soul rise, and going directly to it.

Joan Cortés has not abandoned any of the connotations of his sculpture. The white of practically all his works is also the source of light in Memòria de l’aigua; a white landscape that, given the succession of straight and curved plains of great gentleness and great sensuality, creates effects of light and shade that naturally contribute to a final modelling of the forms. It is the artist’s own poetry, a white poetry, subtle and captivating, that, from its diaphanous spirit, proffers a feeling of wellbeing, interior peace and a silence that never disturbs.

Location-Hall: Aljub
Production: Es Baluard Museu d'Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma