BRICOLOGÍA_JAVIER CABO 06/05/2022
BRICOLOGY. The ethics of collage and the aesthetics of recycling.
Without a doubt, the work of Javier Cabo (Santiago, 1960) is recognisable by the austerity of its materials and by a cuisine made with the most humble products. His paintings are not made with canvases, stretcher frames or standard commercial colours, but rather with sackcloth, pigments or recycled supports. In 2019 she presented in this gallery "Suma de restos", her first exhibition of collages made with waste materials. His iconographic universe of everyday scenes, still lifes, landscapes, bullfighting or carousels, was thus dressed with everything that is useless to build the skeleton of a new aesthetic and eco-sustainable narrative.
Bricología is the second instalment of a project that aims to vindicate art as an active means of collective awareness. The creation of works of art with materials extracted from rubbish is not new, nor is the environmental deterioration suffered by the planet. Today´s society generates an enormous amount of waste and recycling has become an essential action to protect the environment. In art created from recycled materials, these acquire value thanks to the intervention of creativity. Thus, numerous creators all over the world offer us a critical message about excessive consumption and environmental pollution. This type of art seeks to transform waste such as paper, cardboard, wood, glass, plastics, metals or rubber into elements for the construction of artistic objects. The concept, therefore, goes beyond conventional recycling, as these objects surpass the economic, cultural and social value of the original product.
The collages of leftovers that Javier Cabo shows us in this new exhibition, created from the compositional knowledge and aesthetic canons typical of an artist with a background and trajectory such as his, are presented as a conscientious DIY work with multiple found elements, thus giving them a new useful life and contributing to their use. At the same time, they provide us with highly captivating images due to their double ethical and aesthetic condition, opening us up to a genuine universe that invites us to enjoy the senses while at the same time inciting us to reflection.
Javier Cabo holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid and a PhD in Modern Art History from the University of Santiago de Compostela. He currently works as a lecturer in the Department of Plastic Arts Didactics at the USC. His work, present in important art collections, gives us guidelines about the inner world of an artist capable of reconciling historical and theoretical knowledge with the practical exercise in the research of new artistic proposals.
WITH THE COLLABORATION OF 
|
