JARR, " PAIN OR PLEASURE"

PAIN OR PLEASURE: A CRITICAL JOURNEY ON A SUBVERSIVE ARTIST’S TRAJECTORY.

Revision of a trajectory
A decade expires since the artist Juan Antonio Rodríguez Roca´s first exposition shown in Madrid. The interwoven of the dancing and painting world motivated a plastic investigation which prompts in its form being bold in its expression and subtlety veiled after the lirism of his so priced dancers nowadays. Since Pas-â-quatre’s musicality to the abrupt sound of his new prints on radical, there is a constant, persevering and hardy way of investigation made from the most sincere honesty together with his creative spirit. Patient and far from pleasure approval and critical agreement, his path has been noticed of artist’s spiritual function of a visionary conscience in today society. Ten years spent where he looked for being vehicle and expression of his time from the ways and resources that postmodernism has within him reach but flattenning with myths and unreal gods of the modern, academy and institutional.

Fragments and sequences
Both his personality and works of art are stich-repaired and assembled by fragments which, not by his condition, pieces lose nature and entity. His different series form an evolutive and rational sequence depriveless of drastic turnes and revisions on himself. A giddy rhythm exchanges, according to his beatings and anxieties which he melts and states, crosses out and highlights some aspects remaining constantly as a continuous bass string in a melody.
That speed of change has been analized in each of his moments and now due to his last work of art as a recopilation of critical texts having a look his path tittled PAIN OR PLEASURE is edited. A deep meaning to the tittle of his last work is given and also for being a metaphor of his own path full of efforts and rewards of pain and pleasure.

Search period and Jarr & Jarr. Co
With the dancers during the search period, the museologist Silvia Tena, already insisted on the contrast between sweetnes and subtlety of its world with the “violence of its fillings, the spontaneity of artist’s gestural action and the plastic experimentation which supposes an integration of the objects as physics reality afford us”.
Expression and objectionable are two aspects which were strengthened in 1999 in Jarr & Jarr. Co. A production absolutely devoted to his dog which won in irony, distance discovered a new way to see from a compositive level aproximating to the movie framing or to the device of the comic. But overcoat, according to the critic Josep Lluis Peris; “ a pictorial exercise provided of certain difficulty in which the fragmentary approximation and a bit minimalist to the object-dog has been developed in a coherent an unitary way” was appeciated.

The mysticism of the music
The international projection of his work of art arrives together with the iconographic and neo-baroque elaboration of the world in a musical key and with the brilliant golden bread as a base of his technique when he draws. In that project strains and influences were harmonized since the neo-imagining and the Pop Art to the New Abstraction, looking through thousands of regardings and setting up dialogs and new proposals. In this occasion, Román de la Calle, the president of the Real Academy of Fine Art of San Carlos, emphasizing not only the “intertextuality” of his work of art but also his “Black Boxes” which “throws us into another direction between objectual serches, diaries of personal and up-close memory and conceptual winks clinged on maybe to the staves which tauten, subject and trap the boxes of the resources”.

Radicalism: the object in itself
Photographic explorations came after the “An angel eye”. Insertions on public art projects and a national and international, deep and expositive activity which reached last year in a monographic exposition in the Museum of Fine Art of Mexico. Authors such as Manuel Muñoz Ibañez o Carlos Sorler d’Hyver presented their works of play together with those of JARR in different publications today compiled. But his way was progressively keeping out any classicistic connotations in order to state with indebted courage his diletante and obscene transmissor of today man’s corrupted identity condition. A new aesthetics of the ugly trend huges his soul in his pictorial facet and the object in itself, in its still life condition, in a being’s putrid expression is turned into. This way his thorough search on rubbishes and ruines to give them a new opportunity in the level of cretaion and art begins. Sewed and assembled pieces there suffer their own  purgatory between wet beings moaning of pleasure and pain.
Reached this piont  I make Christia Parra-Duhalde’s words mine in a text from the catalogue: Jarr may has gone far saying us who we are, but if art does not doing it he does not fulfill his function. I know the artist, I recognize his talent and I really know his work is correct absolutely.

        Alejandro Villar Torres

Translated by Alberto Molina Garrido