At the end of 2023, Juan Garaizábal returned from Shanghai. He has now also established a studio there, the latest setting for his Urban Memories project, the series of sculptures on a colossal scale that reproduce missing architectural elements, reclaiming with their metal gesture the space they once occupied.
The monumental Ever Time Gate, almost ten meters of stainless steel in the shape of a staircase to heaven that was presented at the Jing’an Sculpture Biennale in 2020, now has a permanent place in a park in the canal area of ??the megalopolis china by popular acclaim. And, until the end of last December, it has been accompanied by another pair of equally evocative works, Ever Time Balcony (20.5 meters) and Infinite Pagoda (3.8). “I believe in the energy of that which has been extraordinary,” she says. “When I recover an urban memory, I bring back to life something that has been exceptional at a given moment. I remember it with a component of adventure, of jumping, that the challenge is noticeable. The literal reconstruction of what already existed would only be a pastiche.”
It has been a long year for the artist, who has had installations and exhibitions in France, the United States, Mexico and China. Finally, he receives in his house in Madrid (“The workshop is very visible,” he warns), a habitable – and orderly – catalog of his many journeys. He is reading a book of Zen stories. “I found several on Amazon, I am very interested in that ritual of simplicity. The meditation part, less so. I am not of a contemplative state. I flow very little,” he reports with a laugh. The Chinese experience, he says, has “blown his mind, altered the other hemisphere of my head.” He has even learned Mandarin. He already knows five languages.
Garaizábal (Madrid, 1971) is not an artist like the others, also because he has insisted on not being one. A lot. At the age of 14 he saw how Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the Parisian Pont Neuf in ocher canvas and knew that for him there was no turning back. It was 1985. However, he started studying Business. “I had tried to do Fine Arts in Italy, but I had the mold of my grandfather, the patriarch, the magnate, who seemed the most to me. When I finished my degree, I understood that this was not me and I began a path of renunciation regarding what I had experienced. It was good for me to exercise my mind and acquire a certain discipline. In that sense, I am not bohemian at all,” he admits.
The definitive epiphany came to him during a visit to the Dalí Museum in Figueres: “There I discovered what it means to have a world of my own. Being able to create a personal universe is the best.”
If it took him a while to build it, it was because it was difficult for him to find his voice, that powerful personal language with which to express himself universally. He first established his workshop in the effervescent Berlin of the nineties, to be “on equal terms, even if that meant being left without national allies.” He is referring, of course, to the living forces of Spanish art, institutional or private, which have never been “colleagues of curators.”
In the German capital, for that matter, he discovered the importance of ideas. “Spain is a country of relationships, of judging people. That’s why my childhood and youth were frustration, because here I didn’t see what I thought,” he reveals. And then he goes and marries Claudia Stilianopoulos Ridruejo.
We first learned about Juan Garaizábal through the social chronicle. He introduced him to her as the designer and curator of the work of his first wife, a large-volume sculptor, yes, but also the daughter of Pitita Ridruejo and Mike Stilianopoulos. Casa de Clo, the decorative art, furniture and jewelry company that they launched in 1998, was more likely to be fodder for coated paper than for specialized criticism.
“Claudia was a rarity, like me. Being next to her was a wonderful learning experience. With her I lost respect for the scale. And I came out as an artist. I was 27 years old, maybe that’s why they say I’m a late creator,” he concedes, before finishing: “Eduardo Arroyo [painter, sculptor and engraver, luminary of national pop neofiguration] had the theory that this was going to sink my career. But to the extent that I have managed to impose my art, I have managed to not get carried away completely.”
Eighteen consecutive editions of presence in Arco contemplate it. “I have tried to be exotic in Germany and France, just as I do now in the US and China. I have known how to play a card that was not possible here, although it no longer worries me in the least. “I feel recognized to the extent that I am recognized outside,” he says.
When, in an exercise of honesty, he says “I have been a Rolls Royce on the outside with a seized Mini engine,” the sculptor recognizes himself as equally privileged as he is a loser: “My grandfather said, I think quoting Rousseau, that Happiness in life is doing what you have to do. And my path was not the good life. “I don’t want another can of caviar, I want something else.” That grandfather he alludes to so much, father of his mother, is the Catalan Enrique Marsans, founder of Viajes Marsans and pioneer in revolutionizing the tourism industry in Spain.
On his paternal side he is also useful: his father’s father was Ángel Garaizábal Bastos from Alava, founding member of the Spanish Society of Orthopedic Surgery and Traumatology, chief medical officer of Atlético de Madrid and the Spanish Footballers’ Mutuality. “Some guerrillas murdered him in Mozambique, they confused him with an American astronaut, what things,” he says. That his existential adventures have been – continue to be – that of an adventurer cannot be surprising.
“I am obsessed with finding paths that have not been explored, working in a place that thinks differently and transforming myself in the attempt,” he says. Her creative process can thus be understood as an extension of those trips that she undertook as a young woman with her mother and siblings, crossing Africa from north to south and Asia from west to east in an SUV (it is narrated by her mother, Isabel Marsans Astoreka, in the book In Bed in the Desert). Hence, also, the concept of efficiency that she applies to her work: “Travelling, I learned to solve problems, to use my head to minimize them, to be as clean, lucid and orderly as possible. I only generate chaos in the workshop, beating an iron. But I need silence, and then everything collected. I don’t throw anything, I hate throwing. Good sculpture requires something at hand that you have not thrown away, the stick, the bricks, what has fallen from the ceiling.”
However, the author of the Bohemian Church of Bethlehem, the piece installed in Berlin that gave wings to his artistic concept of urban memories in 2012, does not have to be looked for in the studio. “My perfect day is not the workshop, it is anywhere on the planet, with a coffee and time to think,” he confesses. “I have a literary way of understanding the world, as if it were a novel, an individual story. What I like is to transform reality. I get up like a motorcycle every morning to die for a detail, a shadow, a light. And the fact that everything can be shit hasn’t taken away my energy to make this kind of effort. If this mechanism were deactivated, I don’t know what I would do.”
Solitary by nature, the sculptor nevertheless admits a certain degree of co-authorship in his work, and not only because many works are nourished by dialogue and shared opinions with those who commission them (the figure of the collector is key in his career, he admits ): since these are almost always installations in public spaces, people must also feel like they are theirs.
“Most public sculptures would be better off not existing. The good ones are an exception: those that recover, add, integrate, without removing. They have to generate debate and disruption, of course, but without trying to be anyone’s voice, but everyone’s,” he explains. “That’s why I say that mine is a constant failure, because when you delve into a project, you realize that it really shouldn’t be carried out, for different reasons. Almost all my sculptures begin as temporary installations, that is, they are not invasive. If they are to become permanent, a review exercise is necessary. Maybe I don’t have much left to hit the cake. The day he screws up, I hope he knows how to rectify it.”
The last question is obvious: Are you aware that your work, when integrated into urban spaces and knowing how human beings spend their lives, will also be just memory one day? “I don’t mind. Is a million years longer than a second? It depends on what happened. The balance of what I have done is already settled. I have lived, I have projected that energy that was worth the same for a second or forever, something that seems even more stimulating to me. Sliding towards normality doesn’t interest me.”
