Art from the Lucidity Salvador Paniker

SALVADOR JUANPERE

PARADIGMA±

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ART FROM LUCIDITY

Salvador Paniker

Salvador Juanpcrc belongs to that fringe ot artists with a
vocation for luridity who do not repudiate a theoretical
framework in which to insert their own work. A theoretical
framework that is inevitably provisional. Self-awareness
without «c.xccss awareness*. The point is thai art is also
knowledge, although every work of art refers only to itself,

A vocation for lucidity is not equivalent In a
justification of art. In Antiquity, this justification was not
precise; nor is it today, when nothing is obvious. Cariamer
writes that «when art no longer wished to be anything
other ihan art, the great modern revolution began.:.. That is
so r but the process has not come to an end. The autonomy
ol the aesthetic (Kant) led to the wdeath of art» in Hegel.
Today we know that art is not dead. It is just that a new
origin-directed impulse is emerging: to reincorporate art in
life, thai is, in the origin, without abdicating its essentially
enigmatic, and innovative nature.

It has been pointed mil thai Ihere is something
monstruoux in so-called Art with a capital A, which is a
strictly modern, Western phenomenon. Not so long ago,
let's say five hundred yean, there were no museums or

galleries or concert halls, nor a special class ol people called
artists. What today we call art was inseparable from
everyday life and more immediate- In Ihis context, the
avant-gardes and the emancipation of art have signified at
one and the same time a great hreakthrough and a great
loss. On the one hand, a fertile wave of freedom is
emerging; on the other, no-one no longer knows what
they are dealing with.

Personally, I have often referred to the ^unreality
syndrome^ that characterises our age and to the function
of art as the recovery of that lost reality. Or also: the
recovery of the original nori -duality. Modernity definitively
transcended the old Aristotelian scheme of art as the
imitation (mimesis,! of nature. Arl is creation in which, in
effect, there comes about the miracle of transcending
dualities; between nature and copy, between form and

content, between means and end. The Romantics saw this;
in a general way, art has to do with the transcendence of
the duality of subject/object.

I here is nothing irrational about the miracle of this
transcendence, but it is much more than rational and
obeys the essence of creation in freedom. No reductionism
is possible here. George Steiner showed himself to be f jstly
implacable with doctrine J like psychoanalysis, structuralism
or deconstruclionist theory that purport to give a scientific
explanation of the work ol art. The miracle exists and
somehow reality is recovered- The festive is reinvented.
Something is noticed. A foundational paradox: art has to do
with the world to the extent that the world is inexplicable.
Art has to do with the self to the extent that the self is
unending.

Another paradox; art as a symbolic response in order
to transcend the symbolic. Art as an impossible mission
that seeks to break the vicious circle ot a culture made of
symbols which refer only to other symbols. So there is
nothing strange about the (act that wilh thp agony of
modernity a certain destruction of «thc artistic thing-
should come about (or the sake ol the act, the ceremony,
the event, the gesture. Reinventing the festive, yes indeed,
but with a common characteristic, in part the legacy of
surrealism: the blotting out of the boundaries between art
and life.

J ife, art; today both demand extra creativity thai was
not formerly indispensable. Creativity to adapt to an
increasingly complex environment. Creativity that implies
unplanned responses to unforeseen stimuli and
disturbances. With a very special accepting of chance.
Salvador Juanpere himself has on occasion referred to a
future universe colonised by our creativity.

Life as art, art as life. Lucidity as the awareness of
paradox. To lose all will to make art and thus enter the
State of grace that makes art possible. The sculptor Brancusi
put it like this: «G? qui m difficile ce n'esl pos de (aire, mats
de se mettrcdans i'etat de faiie,» Creation in freedom then
concurs with the Taoisl wu-wei teaching, in which one acts
without pursuing any predetermined goal. I have
suggested giving the name of exploring to this action which

transcends the old principle of purpose. The creative
individual acts not in pursuit of a goal, but rather to find
out what is the goal to pursue. Exploring is thus a revealing
and an aietheb, a therapy without dogma. And for ihis
reason, at heart the creative individual never knows what
he/she wants. ,

Salvador juanpere is an artist who is abreast of the
latesL paradigmatic shifts in science and philosophy. He is
wont to quote Koestler and David 8ohm, Pnogene,
Mandelbrot, Einstein, Schrddinger. He acknowledges a
debt to my own work, which is immensely gratifying to
me. Some of us think (hat beneath any adventure in
present-day art and science there must beat a shall we
say «mystical» impulse: which Juanpere himself has called
a -flight to the Origin* as a counterpart to the abyss of
uncertainty. To put it another way: the recovery,
through the very sophistication of languages, of the
original non-duality. This is Che essence of what I call the
retroprogressive^rnode, where growing complexity and the
approach to the origiry are two sides of the same process.

Complexity, uncertainty, pluralism. All creators today
are searching for their own language, and if * schools*
divide and subdivide to infinity, it is because art returns to
life, and life always overflows beyond us. However, this very
overflowing life is the common ground that allows us to,
let's say, «wirik» at each other from the fragmentation of
languages.

I invite the work of Salvador Juanpere to be viewed in
this context at once lucid and exploratory. Today the artist
knows that the times of simplification, naivety or
reductionism have ended. No totalitarian synthesis ol the
world is possible. The world is essentially complex,
unpredictable, ambiguous, chaotic even. We belong to the
age of uncertainty where it is advisable to develop a taste
for the difficult, release extra creativity, explore chance,
accept paradoxes, look out on the open air of lucidity.

What is at stake is art as creation and art as
experience. Because the time has come to acknowledge it:
hardly ever do we have experiences; only sensations
hanging horn doctrines. Art from lucidity is an invitation to
penetrate the « forbidden territory ol the unnameable».