Joana Cera opens a telluric oasis in the middle of Madrid

MadridThe exhibition by Joana Cera (Barcelona, ​​​​1965) that the Vila Casas Foundation has organized at the Blanquerna Cultural Center is a surprise and an oasis. In the middle of Madrid, the works of this artist evoke nature and ancestral knowledge with symbols such as the sun and the snake. The sculptures and installations on display recall a certain idea of ​​alchemy, as if they were between this world and another, or if they could be transformed from one moment to the next. The works of Cera, who defines herself as a conceptual artist, are imbued with a very personal mysticism. "In Joana Cera's work we find the will to overcome dualisms to reach a synthesis," says Natàlia Chocarro, the director of external projects for the foundation and the curator of the exhibition, whose inauguration was attended by the Minister of Culture, Sònia Hernández Almodóvar. "A synthesis between the human and the metaphysical, between the telluric and the cosmic, the physical and the intangible," she emphasizes.

The exhibition, which is part of the Puntos de Fuga program, is titled Extremities to join ends, because a constant in Cera's works is "trying to unite two apparently opposite extremes", such as high temperature clay and low temperature clay. The tour is organized from Lot's wife, one of the two works on display that are part of the Vila Casas Foundation collection. The rest, dating from 1995, are presented as if they were that woman's "dream." Like the biblical character to which she refers, Lot's wife It is made from salt. It is a substance that has undergone a crystallization process, something that Cera is very interested in. That is why he has often worked with rock crystals. “Rock crystals have an internal order,” says the artist.

Because of this internal order, Cera decided not to manipulate the crystals but to simply combine them with other minerals and stones and determine how to arrange them. “When I set out to make contemporary sculpture with stone, I ended up working with materials that were not traditional in sculpture carving, so I ended up working with semi-precious stones and crystallized stones. A crystal is a perfect thing,” he explains. And in recent years, his work has become even more dematerialized, with his latest works including holograms and audios. "I come from sculpture, but what guides me is the concept. I was a resident at the Spanish Academy in Rome in 2019 and 2020. I applied in the sculpture category. In theory I was going to work with clay and wax, but I started working and suddenly it made sense to do it with a hologram."

Working with the body

Another aspect of Joana Cera's work is the use of the body. Cera says of herself that she has "very little land." Thus, as if it were an act of taking root, she stuck her fingers and toes into a block of clay, filling the void in plaster. Curiously, her fingers end up forming a kind of landscape. "Sometimes the most powerful poetry of the piece seems to be found in its own concreteness, in its idea. The final result of the work, its formal appearance, is nothing more than a spoil, something like the rejection of a digestion and, if it were not for the fact that it is in the process of execution where the most unexpected and interesting things tend to happen, those would be Cera in the catalogue of the exhibition.