Aniversary of the140th birth of the architect JUJOL by Ampparito
In 2019 the artist AMPPARITO won the call that we managed in conjunction with the City of Sant Joan Despí for the realization of a mural in honor of the architect Josep Maria Jujol. This action was part of the activities in honor of the 140th anniversary of his birth and which took place in the city of Sant Joan Despí of which he was municipal architect for many years.
The call had a good national and international participation with more than 70 entrants. The winner would make an artistic residency in the city and paint a mural to inaugurate the main week of events in honor of the figure of the architect.
A few words from the artist:
Josep María Jujol allowed himself to be influenced by nature to such an extent that it is evident in all his works. He was not an architect to use, since he took his gestures to the extreme, that style when drawing or writing, a kind of pendolist of the subconscious, who with a highly expressive method covered all available surface. his style permeates from the ornamentation to the structural, creating surfaces with dreamlike connotations, as can be seen in the Can Negre stairs, in the Casa Mañach or in the Metropol theater in Tarragona.
One of the aspects that most caught my attention was its calligraphy, spasmodic, highly gestural and enigmatic, which maintains legibility in the background. The inscriptions of the names of their children in the Can Negre chapel attest to this. Although its reading is not evident, it creates a great contrast with the whole of the room, an exuberant baroque that engulfs you and makes you be part of the room.
This nerve is also evident in the way he designed gates and doors, a symphony of cuts, deformations, bends and dents. These frameworks remind me of the branches of a recently pruned tree, those spasms and changes of meaning are the result of the subconscious, the most natural and primitive. It is impossible to carry them out through the sieve of consciousness, it is necessary to free the hand, escape the control of reason. I consider this connection highly significant, since organic elements are very present in all of Jujol’s work. This is probably due to its religious nature, so the link with nature is very present, the way in which the elements act on matter takes on a main character. In the same way that water and wind erode the rocks, he models the edges of prefabricated architectural elements to make them his own, erasing any trace of asepticism so characteristic of modern architecture of the moment (breaking point, 1929 exhibition, Barcelona pavilion of Mies van der Rohe VS fountain in the Plaza de España, Jujol).
Seeing creation itself as something cyclical, which needs substrates from the old, apparently useless, to be reorganized and create the new. Just as plants need time, heat, water, darkness, sun and nutrients (manure or other decomposing plants, ashes, etc.) to develop, the two trees in front of the wall have needed all these elements to be what they want. are today. A transformation of cuttings to what they are today and with the passage of time their inexorable disappearance.
That is why it seems significant to me to anchor this witness of nature in the year 2019, the same as the 140th anniversary of the birth of Jujol. Making a portrait of a tree next to the tree itself freezes it in time, this daily and casual element works like the spread of the ducks of Casa Serra Xaus, like a germ from which to start creating.
In this way they want to make clear those elements of nature, the passage of time, that inevitable path towards disappearance through development, of unconscious decisions, vital events, why does a branch twist to the right, or to the left or does it stay straight? How does it affect the decisions of the gardener who prunes him in his development? What about the buildings that surround it, leaving light only in certain parts? How will the alteration of the environment modify the paths that its branches follow? All this is unpredictable, like Jujol’s gestures, he simply finds paths that are the result of many variables in the same way as nature.
This piece creates something that, like everything around us, will disappear, suspicion of manure. What will perish before, the tree or your portrait of the year 2019? Be that as it may, what is certain is that it will become part of that substrate that will serve as the basis for the new that will come.
Due to this mutable nature of the work, I proposed to take a photo from the two points of view chosen once a month the first year. And biannually the remaining years (before and after pruning) to follow the process of changing the object with respect to the model.
