09 May 2015- 22 November 2015 - Andorra at the 56 Venice Art Biennale - Joan Xandri

Installation - Shared Soul -

Excerpts from Shared Soul

Dr. Henry Périer Commissioner, Venice 2015

It is impossible for an artist to remain insensitive to the ecosystem of the Principality of Andorra. In this mountainous territory of extraordinary beauty, nestled in the chain of the Pyrenees between France and Spain, nature, omnipresent, rubs shoulders with an imposing urban scene of shops and commerce of all kinds, judged by many to be bordering on kitsch. But the mountains are very close and the inhabitants can feel, on those snowy summits, near the sky and infinity, in a sort of subliminal euphoria.

The young Joan Xandri grew up in this exceptional environment.

He invites us here to contemplate a bestiary about which any narrative seems to be impossible. Where can he have met and seen these creatures that he describes with his characteristic style? But his present concerns have led him in another direction, to a second way of looking that he wishes to share with the public.

In that Andorran nature which constitutes the basis of his culture, but which he restores to us in an unreality so richly suggestive and enchanting that it attains a sort of semantic autonomy. 

The enigma—for there is one in each painting—leaves the field open to a contemplation no less richly marvellous. Evoked, suggested, sometimes only implied, the subject appears as if endowed with a physical and peremptory presence. As memorialist of a world that is familiar yet utterly strange in its presentation, Joan Xandri continues to elaborate his rituals in his quest for the truth, of humanity and of painting. And he always seeks this truth in the natural world, where he feels truly at home with the animals, which might almost replace human beings.

For that purpose he has worked out a strategy and a very precise technical plan. Some twenty paintings are arranged like the long prow of a ship, placed standing on the ground and overlapping, often upside down, hiding parts of the adjacent pieces. The whole constitutes a giant puzzle that takes shape in a corner of the room reserved for this purpose. Canvases on stretchers and in frames have always been the normal way paintings are exhibited.

They thus bear an important, even essential cultural charge. In grouping them together, on the ground, the artist reinforces the idea of abstruseness, of a wall or barrier, of resistance or obstruction of the visibility of the work. But the visitor will also perceive cracks or fissures through which he may glimpse paintings. Whereas the painter normally seeks a coherent vision in the space determined by the surface and dimensions of the canvas, the post-modern artist multiplies views that are partial, fragmentary, even absurd.