Shanghai Garden - Juan Olivares
Juan Olivares (Valencia, 1973)
According to Juan Olivares, “Painting is very close to what happens, to the permanent flow of things. Painting is a way of experimenting and creating continuously that helps us get to know ourselves. For several years now, my work has been inspired by the painting process. If we focus our attention on the process itself, there are many elements that are painting in themselves. The preparation of a primer, the choice of support, the palette, the discards...
The palette incessantly accumulates mixtures and searches, but it also stores all the time that a painting or a series of paintings needs to be revealed. Heraclitus affirmed that the foundation of everything is in incessant change. Everything is transformed in a process of continuous birth and destruction from which nothing escapes. In the palette, we can discern the traces of that process.” In this sense, the most recent paintings are containers of experiences and searches for small revelations through mixtures, from which you somehow emerge fulfilled.
Painting is the process. Some of the paintings in the "Shanghai Garden" exhibition at the Maior gallery were created in Shanghai and inspired by a romantic idea: finding a palette that can embody the emotions experienced and the energy the city transmits. At the same time, the idea of the garden as a search for a lost paradise is also present in all the works and speaks to us of respect for nature, even more so now after the tragedy experienced in Valencia. As Mario Satz tells us in his book "Small Paradises," the classical Chinese garden was the first of all gardens devised by humankind to delimit a specific area of a hill or stream and consider it, as such, a place of manifestation of a beauty that must be cared for, respected, and cherished, but never deformed... The irregularity of the garden guaranteed that nothing and no one would be completely subject to any order other than that of the universe itself.
Juan Olivares has exhibited, among other exhibition spaces, in 2023-24 at the CCCC Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània, Valencia, in 2008 at Centro La Gallera, Valencia and IVAM, Centre Julio González in 2004, Valencia. He has participated in various national and international exhibitions in Shanghai, New York, Brussels, Geneva, Paris, and Rome. He has also participated in international fairs: ArcoMadrid, Estampa Madrid, Artissima Turin, Miart Milan, Artcologne Cologne, Shanghai Art Fair, Arte Lisboa, Maco Mexico, Pinta London, and Pulse Miami.
His work is part of important collections such as the Ministerio de Cultura, Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, Caja Madrid, Bancaja Foundation, Banco de Valencia, L'Oréal, Universitat Politècnica de València, The Cooper Union School of Art, New York, Banco Sabadell, Olor Visual, DKV, Ars Citerior, Cañada Blanch Foundation, Hortensia Herrero Foundation, Repsol, ICCI Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, Swatch Art Center, Shanghai... among others.