Juan Bolivar: High Voltage

Juan Bolivar High Voltage

JGM GALLERY

Published by JGM Gallery, on the occasion of the exhibition Juan Bolivar : High Voltage September 22nd - October 21st 2017 Publication designed by Tom Saunders & Janis Lejins Exhibition photography by Damian Griffiths JGM Gallery 24 Howie Street London SW11 4AY

To Clive; for his teachings on early modernism and esoteric wisdom.

Clive Hambidge (1956-2017)

info@jgmgallery.com ISBN 978-1-9998458-0-3 Š 2017, JGM Gallery and the artist.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner without prior permission.

JGM GALLERY

Contents 7

| Introduction, Jennifer Guerrini Maraldi

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| ‘The Trouble with Shapes’, Ian Monroe

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| Exhibited Works

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| About the Authors

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Introduction High Voltage - Rocking and Rolling Modernism Jennifer Guerrini Maraldi

“Can I Sit Next to you Girl” was the first thing I heard from Australian band AC/DC. It was 1974, I was in my early twenties and had recently become the owner and director of Powell Street gallery in Melbourne. AC/DC’s debut single, first recorded with Dave Evans, was a total flop. It scarcely made 50 on the Australian charts. Tenaciously the band replaced Evans with the electrifying Bon Scott. It only took them 10 days in 1974 to record the entire album - High Voltage.

The moment High Voltage was released it was clear that AC/DC’s brand of pub-rock was destined to take over the world. The band reciprocated the spirit of 1970s Australia and their energy reflected a society with an increasing sense of self-assured determination. In Australia in the 1970s there was enthusiasm to overhaul the legacy of European colonisation and become more independent - we formally recognised Aboriginal Land rights, we withdrew from Vietnam, abolished the ‘White Australia’ policy and ruled for equal pay for men and women. AC/DC were emblematic of my generation of Australians - they were a hard-drinking, hard-working group; baby boomers, who were vocally coming terms with themselves whilst simultaneously coming to terms with the late 20th century.

Now, at the opposite end of the world and over four decades after AC/DC’s first ill-fated single, I find myself owning and directing a gallery again. I have been exhibiting contemporary Australian Indigenous art in the UK for over a decade and going forward my expanded vision for JGM Gallery is to celebrate the most enriching contemporary art practices irrespective of their origin.

You can imagine how excited I am to be showing High Voltage Juan Bolivar.

Juan, a Venezuelan born, British artist and curator, has produced a body of work that fuses his pan-cultural awareness with painting to create an exhibition that epitomises our vision for JGM Gallery. Juan Bolivar’s paintings are an energetic expression of his sense of contemporaneity. By combining the eurocentric forms of 20th Century geometric modernism with the energy of AC/ DC in High Voltage we witness Bolivar proposing a unique cultural form.

I would like to thank Juan Bolivar whose irrepressible energy has ensured that after so many years I find myself sitting next to AC/DC once again.

Jennifer Guerrini Maraldi Director JGM Gallery Overleaf ‘The Jack’ (after Malevich, 1928-29) 73 x 52 cm

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The Trouble with Shapes Ian Monroe Shapes can be remarkably dangerous things. In 1915 the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich painted a small two and a half foot square canvas consisting of a black square hovering on a white background. That was it. With these remarkable simple means Suprematism was born and the pictorial plane was forever emancipated from the chains of representation. Or that was the claim that was made by the circle of artists joining this nascent avant-garde movement. For Stalin, 15 years later in 1930, the finer points of geometric abstraction were less enthralling. He ordered that Malevich be interrogated, and judging by the two month jail sentence for ‘formalism’ that was handed down, Stalin was apparently not impressed.

This is the trouble with shapes. For according to Malevich, the reduction in his paintings was paradoxically intended to increase the possibilities and the meanings of his art, to open it as he said to “the infinite space of the human skull”. In reference to the painting ‘Black Square’ itself, he said “it is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins”. One can only imagine how these claims would have gone down with Malevich’s bourgeois hating interrogators. The goals of the totalitarian state were firmly rooted in a collective Social Realism, in representing the struggle of the working classes, not the pseudo spiritual quest of self actualisation that Malevich was promoting. But of course the irony is that by persecuting this kind of art, this geometric reduction, the Stalinist state was tacitly recognising that all of Malevich’s claims were indeed true, and more importantly to them, very worrying.

Fig 1 - Ground Zero, acrylic on canvas, 53.5 x 53.5cm, 2014

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They were worried of course because if a simple square can be a signifier for such a massive and potentially universal concept — the liberation of the human mind — then what power does a set of specific political dogmas and doctrines have? If just by gazing at a black square, a shape that everyone around the world can recognise and is familiar with, the “true movement of being begins”, then possibly

Fig 2 - Holy Diver, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 190cm, 2012

the specifics of our own beliefs and institutions is a much more slippery concept. Why do we need the state to emancipate our lives when this two and half foot square will do the job? This is indeed a dangerous shape.

But a further complication arises that as far as we know the Stalinist state was not concerned with, and that is the relationship this painting has to language. The painting “Black Square” can be perfectly encapsulated, even compressed in sense, to the words in its title. One almost does not need the painting. The title says it all. Black Square. Got it. So not only does the painting demonstrate the ability of images — or shapes — to suggest much more than they represent, it also engages with the power of language itself, the power of a system of signs.

And this is where the images of Juan Bolivar operate; the place where the eye and the mind attempt to connect a shape with a word or a phrase, where a graphic meets a glyph. This innate desire to know the thing we are looking at, to name it, is a very basic human desire. Once we have a name for a thing we can perform some kind of operation on it and it becomes useful. Bolivars’ work willfully complicates this desire. It reminds us that in the 21st Century our graphics and our glyphs are now so layered, so nuanced that the moment we utter a things name, it will have shifted, it will have resisted the interrogation. The usefulness of this naming, our need to find out how we can benefit from this collection of shapes, therefore gives way to the realisation that no set of signs and signifiers is ever stable, that we may end up in a ever more complicated spiraling of meaning.

Bolivar may start his paintings with the abstractions of a Malevich black square (fig 1), or a Frank Stella striped triangle (fig 2), but they become New York’s ground zero with a match stick or a hang glider over a jail cell, which itself is a knowing reference to Peter Halley. There is nothing in the images of Bolivar that is purely abstract, without referent or context, it is all9

representational. Picasso was famously skeptical of abstraction, stating that “there is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality”. This is precisely the territory that Bolivar explores. His works vibrate within the question that Malevich demanded from his work; a simultaneous moment of recognition of the form, and the open ended possibility of this form to suggest an entire system beyond the singularity of its shape or its name.

It is important that Picasso said you can remove all traces of reality. He left it open ended, it’s up to you. And this is the game Bolivar delightfully plays. There is always a sense of humour and mischief within his works furthered by his use of titles. The titles often refer to the thing itself, but also open the possibilities to seemingly unrelated contexts. For example, in the 2008 show Geometry Wars (John Hansard Gallery), one painting is of a black, white, and grey lifeguard stand / watchtower (fig 3). The title is ‘Baywatch’. The painting demands that the viewer simultaneously hold in their mind the history of maritime military conflict as well as Pamela Anderson and David Hasslehof performing titillating life saving duties. It is with a wry shock that we realise the painting accurately reflects the modern barrage of media channels in which we do indeed hold these contradictory images (shapes) in our minds simultaneously.

For High Voltage, Bolivar deploys the same sense of graphic simultaneity and the compression of language found in his previous work. This time the works weave equally disparate elements of early 20th Century geometric modernism with the hard rock of the band AC/DC. The Fender guitar logo sits atop a Mondrian grid with the resulting image hovering between an amplifier cover and sublime geometric minimalism. In another painting a later figurative Malevich work reappears with a backwards baseball cap and a discarded bottle of Lucozade, standing like the members of the band. Indeed, the title of AC/DC’s seventh studio album Back in Black, the second best selling album of all time, suggests a resurrection of the supposed finality of Malevich’s ‘Black Square’. It’s back, and as inscrutable as ever, but this time it’s really loud. That the originality of the avantgarde should return as a commodified Australian rock and roll blues band is something even Malevich himself would have understood. Later in life, having faced the wrath of the state where his work was removed from public view, he began making teacups adorned with Suprematist shapes.

Fig 3 - Baywatch, acrylic on canvas, 76 x 89 cm, 2008

Bolivar fully understands this complication of signifiers. Via humour, historic awareness, and immense graphic acuity the work embraces a new hybridisation of meanings that is inescapable in the 21st Century. This is not work that simply references itself, or is drawn from the artist’s identity, or relies on a cryptic mythology. In fact, it could not be more grounded in the currency of everyday shapes, in our continual desire to trade, manipulate, and know the language of the forms that surround us. It is evidence of the fact that no painting is ever final, that no set of signs or beliefs is ever fixed. We are continually evolving these troubling shapes and giving them new meanings and trading a laugh with one another when we find a particularly good combination.

Ian Monroe August 2017 10

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The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10, Petrograd 2015

Juan Bolivar High Voltage List of Works

All works acrylic on canvas except collectors edition which are acrylic on Arches paper.

All works were made in 2017 except 3, 22 and, 24 which were made in 2016.

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15

1.

‘Rock n’ Roll Singer’ (after Malevich 1932) 58 x 49 cm

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2.

‘She’s Got Balls’ (after Kliun, 1917) 88 x 69 cm

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3.

‘The Jack’ (after Malevich, 1928-29) 73 x 52 cm

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4.

‘She’s Got Balls’ (after Malevich, 1917-18) 106 x 71 cm

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5.

‘T.N.T.’ (after Mondrian, 1917) 48 x 61 cm

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6.

‘Live Wire’ (after Mondrian, 1919) 86 x 106 cm

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7.

‘T.N.T.’ (after Theo van Doesburg, 1924) 50 x 50 cm

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8.

‘High Voltage’ (A Side) (after Malevich, 1915) 160 x 240 cm 24

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9.

‘Little Lover’ (after Malevich, 1914) 24 x 71 cm

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10.

‘The Rainbow Bar & Grill’ (after Malevich, 1932) 61 x 49 cm

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11.

‘Little Lover’ (after Van Doesburg, 1927) 30 x 30 cm

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12.

‘High Voltage’, Collectors Edition 1/1 Each 50 x 50 cm 30

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22.

‘Can I Sit Next to You Girl’ (after Malevich, 1930-31) , 142 x 164 cm

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23.

‘High Voltage’ (B Side) (after Malevich, 1915) 160 x 80 cm

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24.

‘It’s a Long Way to The Top’ (after Malevich, 1915) 51 x 51 cm

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About the Authors Juan Bolivar Born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1966, Juan Bolivar’s paintings deal with language, abstraction and formalism.

Bolivar Graduated from Goldsmiths College in 2003 receiving the Warden’s Prize. He has received a Pollock-Krasner Award twice (2000, 2009). His work is important collections such as The Government Art Collection, and he has been selected for significant exhibitions such as New British Painting, John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton (2003), East international, Norwich School of Art (2007), and more recently in 2015 included in Nanjing Museum’s first international exhibition of contemporary art, where he was a prize winner. He lives and works in London Ian Monroe Artist, writer and lecturer Ian Monroe was born in New York and currently lives and works in London. He received his BFA from Washington University in Saint Louis and his MA from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2002.

His work has been collected extensively both privately and by major museum collections including the Saint Louis Art Museum, USA, the Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Aarhus Denmark, the Hamburger Banhof in Berlin, Germany and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon, in Leon, Spain.

In addition to his art practice, Monroe has contributed essays to a number of publications, including “Collage, Assembling Contemporary Art”, 2008, by Black Dog Publications.

Jennifer Guerrini Maraldi In the early 1970s, Jennifer Guerrini Maraldi (nee Heathcote), 23 years old, became owner/director of the Powell Street Gallery in South Yarra, Melbourne. With the help of a distinguished stable of artists, including Alun Leach-Jones, Victor Majzner, Fred Cress, Jenny Watson, Lesley Dumbrell, Inge King, David Wilson and Clive Murray-White, Powell Street Gallery was one of the most recognised and successful contemporary exhibiting galleries at the cutting edge of the Australian contemporary art scene.

Eventually moving to London and working in various fields, including fifteen years as a member of the permanent editorial staff of British “Country Life” magazine, Jennifer was lured back to the art world after being completely blown away by a collection of contemporary Australian indigenous paintings she had seen.

JGM Gallery was opened in March 2017 and Jennifer now exhibits Western contemporary art in parallel with the finest examples of Australian indigenous painting and sculpture.

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JGM GALLERY 24 Howie Street London SW11 4AY info@jgmgallery.com

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