Javier Calvo. Works donated to Valencia University

Javier Calvo. Works donated to Valencia University

From April 20 to May 1, 2012

Oberta Room – La Nau Cultural Centre

From Tuesday to Saturday, from 10 to 14 and from 16 to 20 h.

Sunday, from 10 to 14 h.

Praying mantis, 1977 · Mixed technique on canvas, 114 x 146 cm.

Organised by Universitat de València

Coordinated by Norberto Piqueras and Maria José Navarro 

Javier Calvo completed his education at San Carlos Higher School of Fine Arts in 1965. He then furthered studies in Paris with a scholarship granted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he was a student to the lyrical abstract artist Gustave Singier. His Paris trip allowed him to be part of a unique context, being a direct witness of the May 1968 student protest. This period of social upheaval and personal concern can be seen in his works with a plurality of artistic languages that range from Expressionism and Pop-art to Collage. Structural problems, an interest in space, and geometric order moved gradually to the foreground, which caused him to drop figurative art for good. The search for plastic purity and formal language put him in contact with one of the bipolar trends that prevailed in the 1950s Spanish art scene, namely Geometric Abstraction. From his early equations and modular exercises, he moved on to more complex and symmetric compositions, using flat geometric figures in black in the centre of the painting from which a linear mesh comes out, this element in turn generating other octagonal and triangular shapes with a high chromatic perception featuring pink and violet shades. (See Inscribed square).

Inscribed square, 1971 · Acrylic on wood, 80 x 123 cm.

In his Itineraries, the artist studies a number of compositions with geometric trajectories that shape open ways towards infinity, with tension and trapezoidal movement and, at the same time, he makes the use of white lines evident as a way to fix colour and stake boundaries (See Mobile triptych). Javier Calvo’s in-depth study about his Itineraries takes him to labyrinthine shapes that break space up by means of polyptics, i.e. angular, volumetric and closed structures but without curves. (See G-shaped itinerary and Itinerary towards autumn). In his last geometric period, he breaks away from symmetry and starts playing with space, changing the course of his works whose surface is sensitised by means of matter and cloudscapes; it is no longer flat but more expressive and subtle (See Praying mantis). Geometric postulates lost momentum as from 1977, when Calvo started his series Malvarosa, an introspection into his memories as a child and a way of bringing figuration back but with a marked linear influence in the structure of figures and the background. The Constructivist period took him to the foreground of Valencian art but his figuration/geometrization duality is constant throughout his career.

G-shaped itinerary, 1974 · Mixed technique on canvas, 50 x 50 cm. Each side

Lastly, his interest in donating his five paintings to the collection of Universitat de València was raised by an exhibition held at La Nau Cultural Centre, Imaginary. Through the eyes of mathematics, which showed works from the university collection by geometric artists contemporary with Javier Calvo. His absence from the show caused him to make a donation to the institution for its commitment with culture.

Itinerary towards autumn, 1974 · Mixed technique on canvas, 97 x 130 cm.

Javier Calvo developed his Constructivist period from the late 1960s to the second half of the 1970s, inheriting the will of rapprochement between a more and more technological and scientific society and an art secluded by a view very far away from post-modernity. This new uniting trend between scientific-technical culture and artistic-literary culture found motivation in the figure of Vicente Aguilera Cerni, a Valencian art critic, who –resorting to Gestalt psychology- set up the group Antes del arte (1968), a methodological experience and method to try to explain, logically and rationally, the creation of the work of art. The collaborating artists would not lose their freedom, as this experience was not constrained to fixed trends and dogmas but opened to a necessary renewal of art on the basis of scientific, mathematical and calculus models. Javier Calvo would occasionally meet with Antes del arte: on the one hand, in the exhibition Antes del arte III. Serie Matemática, held at the mythical gallery Eurocasa in Madrid 1969, and on the other with the cycle Arte y Ciencia, held in Seville in 1970. His first geometric works of a structural nature, symmetric configuration and plastic purity evolved towards the so-called Itineraries, in which he experimented with broken angles in an elegant tour, sometimes open and sometimes closed, this giving way to his last period, one in which surfaces were sensitized, showing the different finishes of a formal but also subjective and poetic language. Calvo is indeed one of the most outstanding figures from the second generation of abstract geometry artists of Valencia.

Mobile triptych, 1973 · Synthetic paint on wood, 55 x 44 cm. Each part.