Jordi Colomer
Spain, 1962
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Jordi Colomer studied art history at the Universitat de Barcelona, architecture at the EscolaTècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB) and took design courses at the EscolaEina. His work soon turned towards large format iron sculpture, which made him one of the leading figures of the new sculpture that appeared in Spain in the eighties and opened up the horizons of aesthetic experience in unexpected ways. From his first individual exhibition in Barcelona in 1986, his work has shaped a discourse increasingly structured on the basis of the cult of the object: association of objects in an infinite deployment of formal possibilities that become a metaphor for the real dimensions of people's private space. From those found fragments, which he lays out in a space defined by volumes, he asserts the value of what is humblest and most banal in human beings' relationship with their environment. The object, the visible trace of human presence, is what places us in a context which we recognise as close to our everyday experience. Far from their own system, the objects used by Colomer lost their meaning but keep their historic and social substratum. Through deconstruction, he constructs new architectures with fragments of the world and advocates subversion, a disturbance of the habitual order in which the object is found, thus setting it on the same footing as the art object. His artistic structures question the idea of perfection, provide images that disturb the concept of order, touch on the architecture of language and its arbitrary relation with reality and, in short, invite us, in a number of different ways -contradiction and incongruence, adaptation and confrontation- to reinterpret the object. Contiguities and ambiguities or fluctuation of the boundaries between painting and sculpture and between architecture and design. As he himself says, «the artist has to show the mechanisms that make fiction possible». The work he did in the late eighties can be situated in the field of installation, which conceives in a close relationship with the architectural environment. Colomer feels close to the ironic tone of the parables of Marcel Duchamp and the architect Adolf Loos, even though his work also refers to other key artists of the 20th century, such as Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers or AntoniTàpies.
Eva Solans