Blood, Sweat and Tears (about Javier Velasco' art)

“The limit of any pain is an even greater pain” E. M. Cioran

Ovid says that in an amorous conquest “tears are also useful: with tears you will move a diamond; try to have her see your moistened cheeks”, he goes on to advise “be careful not to harm her delicate lips with your violent kisses, so she can’t complain that they have been brutal”. All stories tell of love and death, compassion and violence, sex and pain.

In his work, Javier Velasco strips human emotions, crystallising them into glass, latex and photographic forms. In this way he transports and purifies us at the entrance to his exhibition with a rainfall of tears, leading us into his microcosms. A space full of crystalline suffering, embroidered martyrs, of blood that flows, weaving ramifications snatched form his psyche and offering us an exit in a moulting of artificial skin (programming a life change).

Alice passes through the looking glass to encounter oblivion and the representation of senselessness. Javier Velasco reproduces the contradictions of emotion through glass mutations, as if all the problems and challenges of existence faced by a sensitive being were resolved by transparencies, in a palimpsest of multiple presences and points of view. Glass which organically flows as much as it insulates and protects, or traces its shard paths from one point of tension to another, a broken pact which the devil exploits, demanding our souls before time.

Blood solidifies into organic threads, of glass and chrome mercury, appears before us like the trophy room of a ghostly sot, rebuilding our dreams through lifeblood itself, allowing one to identify the pain of the other. But beyond the medium, he manages to reintegrate the sensibility of the body into the mass of flesh, inviting us to externalise its joys. Behind the suffering we are offered redemption through change, a second skin that we grow, then shed, and store like a shroud of our previous lives.

But the work of Javier Velasco avoids a mystical reading, even though his images sometimes resemble sacred offerings – passions which lance the body, tears which wound, glass thorns, branches of blood, translucent hearts, skin stripped from the body, amnesic writings – paradoxes which penetrate and spread around the sensitive spirit of those who watch, absorbing like sponges, their hairs bristling. Through our own observation and journey Javier Velasco leads us into a rite of passage from which we emerge, with a new skin, a new way of thinking, a purified sensibility.

“Will I be pure enough one day to be reflected in the tears of the saints?” E. M. Cioran

Carlos Trigueros
[From exhibition Javier Velasco "Precaria Propiedad". Sala de exposiciones Abrantes, Universidad de Salamanca - 11 april to 28 may 2003]

(en castellano aquí)