Joan Duran exhibits work at Image Factory
The Image Factory is launching an exhibit tonight featuring the works of Joan Duran. The exhibit features, paintings on canvas, paper and screen prints by the fifty-two year old Spaniard. Today News five spoke to Duran about his art.
Jose Sanchez, Reporting
Duran’s show Crescere is pockets of life that speak more about the moment of creation than the meaning we may hope to find. The artist inspires to bring forth or sprout modern art in this, part two of his three exhibitions, which started last December.
Joan Duran, Artist
“We are just presenting a few pieces, thirty works. All the pieces were made during the last few months this year. They are conceptually very different from the rest of things I have presented to the factory, except for this big piece that we have over there. It’s the only piece that has gone through a long period of work, probably years. I think I have been working with this canvas three or four years and everything else are works that I just produce, bamm, in a second during periods of the last few months. We have the blue series, which is the result of one day of full concentration working only with blue paint and yellow paint and some paper I brought from Barcelona.”
Jose Sanchez
“So it’s all about the process this time?”
Joan Duran
“Yes. It’s all about groups of paintings, seeing the painting, what they have unity and they are very easy to communicate with and they very easy to look at. I always insist they are many arts in this planet. There is that art of painting and there is also the art of viewing the painting. Sometimes one is as difficult as the other. The art of viewing is an art by itself.”
Freud and environmentalists would love to have this artist in their chairs. Though the art is presented in the moment or in the years they take to come to fruition, Duran would even take the trash and leftovers that fall on the floor of his studio to design raw acrylic, bleached metaphors to massacre the walls of the gallery.
Jose Sanchez
“What I was noticing is that if you view them from a distance they’re very simple, very easy to look at. But yet on closer inspection, they are very complex.”
Joan Duran
“Perfect. I think you come close to the point. They look simple, because they are completed very quickly. But they are done only during the few minutes, the few seconds, where you as the artist you are fully concentrated, you are fully into it. You are not distracted by anything and of course this is pure mathematics. Whenever you are like that of course you are not like that everyday. It happens every now and then. Whenever you are in that situation the whole of you light up. Everything comes into it, into you and these few seconds when you open up that valve and let things go, it’s like super concentrated lime juice. It’s very powerful with only a few drops you can have lemonade.”
Joan would violently defend his views that during the last fifteen years Belizean artists have developed beyond painting palm trees and old houses.
Joan Duran
“I think the art scene in Belize has changed dramatically, that’s why I’m so excited, interested and that’s why I don’t mind, I hope I don’t sound dramatic, dying on the job, working as much as I am allowed to. I am very happy to work with the Image Factory.”
“It’s not only that I see a future. The future is already here, and what we have to do now is whip that horse harder and harder so we can draw faster. I believe the same energy you were referring to a few seconds ago, I can still save some for the Image Factory. They benefit from me and I benefit from them because I am able to do things that otherwise, I do not have the space to channel this energy and this desire to work with young people.”
Duran will have his chance to collaborate with more young people, as projects with Image Factory will take him to Havana, Guatemala and Spain. Reporting for News Five, Jose Sanchez.
The exhibit will end on December second. Prices for the pieces range from seven hundred and fifty dollars to ten thousand dollars.
