Joan Cortés · Ple al buit

The search for different forms of beauty accompanies Joan Cortés on his tireless journey through art and life. In the midst of an era of excess and visual vulgarity, of strident colors and impossible forms, Cortés stands tall, looking elsewhere, advancing in other directions. An artist who goes against the grain, he achieves a simple and powerful aesthetic, a simple beauty, the most difficult to find. Cortés's work is an exhausting, complex endeavor, an endless labor full of successes and failures that provides us with a common good: sculptures and prints—which are almost sculptures—that seek to capture the essence of that beauty that has no time, space, or place, or that perhaps contains them all, a timeless beauty, a beauty that is always so.

In this exhibition for the new contemporary art space COR, conceived as an installation, Cortés proposes two distinct lines of research. On the one hand, the usual style in his work, which challenges us through an exquisite abstraction of organic forms and extraordinary beauty. Sculptures and graphic works that refer to the body, to the self, to sex; some pieces that seem to be on the verge of levitation, others that could be the result of a taxonomic dissection or careful microscopic observation; works that are explained through a rich white, a crimson pink, and a rigorous black that draw our attention to those suggestive forms that evoke the most sublime Brancusi and the most delicate Pevsner.

The other line of research presented here is a search of a more material, expressive and atavistic nature, pieces that have to do with refuge, with the lair, with the orography of the earth, with everything that has been made by hand, between the sculpted and the excavated, but which also refer to human ingenuity and its utopias, to the African architectural tradition and to Persian constructive enigmas, to everything that has to do with our history and that defines us as human beings, to everything that is related to our constant and insatiable search for the essential forms of beauty.