Exhibition “Museum of Passions” by Javier Viver. Canal Patrimonio.
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The main piece is Lot’s Woman, a monumental sculpture consolidated with salt, which reminds us of the biblical character of Edit, who was turned into a statue of salt by looking back. Viver questions the nostalgic look at the past and, as a consequence, death: “The refuge in the securities of the past as an escape from the contemporary task leads to death”.
The Museum of Passions will have as its main headquarters the Lázaro Galdiano Museum where it will be inaugurated on 5 February and will be open to the public until 4 May.
The exhibition continues in the Chapel of the Architects of the Church of San Sebastian, an architectural jewel by Ventura Rodríguez, which will be inaugurated on 13 February and can be visited until 4 May, where Javier Viver will carry out a site-specific installation entitled “A beating heart”.
Most of the photographs that will be shown at the Lázaro Galdiano Museum form part of the photo book ‘Révélations‘ -National Prize for the best art book in 2015- that includes the iconography of the Parisian psychiatric hospital of the Salpètrière. The photographs will be shown printed on large canvases or showing the same sheets of the book.
Also on display will be some images from his new project, the photobook Christs and Antichrists -co-edited with RM-, an intervention on a Gospel of Saint Matthew from 1930, illustrated with images from the Spanish Civil War, which will be presented during the exhibition. Together with these photographs, the Madrid artist includes in the exhibition sculptures of human figures from his imaginary production that will dialogue with the works in the Museum.
The intervention “A beating heart” by Javier Viver in the Chapel of the Architects consists of seven murals – some up to 9 metres high – located in the front and side spaces of the chapel and a sculpture of Lot’s wife, on a real scale, under the central axis of the dome.
The programme is completed by the cycle of contemporary music entitled Cum grano salis in the Chapel of the Architects; the 4th symposium on Transcendence and Spirituality in Contemporary Art, at the Francisco de Vitoria University; guided tours of the two venues of the exhibition by the volunteer students of this University and the presentation of the Catalogue of the Museum of Passions and the book Christs and Antichrists.
