Daniel Juarez

Photographs on acetate, gold patent leather, wood and internal LEDs lighting.

Labordeboy, a small town in Santa Fe, Argentina, located in the middle of soy farms. A community where everyone knows each other, greets each other on the street, knows one another’s rhythms, fears and desires.

I went there hoping to find something that could help me get over a period of social phobia I was going through. I arrived with no preconceived artistic agenda, permeable to whatever possibility that may present itself in the place. Right away I found myself being received into strangers’ houses by people who are foreign to the distrust and suspicion felt by those of us who live in big cities.
Surprisingly I noticed that my ability to socialize with strangers remained intact. The peaceful conversations helped let loose my fetishist interest for the objects that surrounded us, the kind that make us remember certain moments, places or dear ones and that keep us company.
From each house, I left with photos taken of an object especially chosen by the host.
Fetishism, cataloging and accumulation, once more being the axis of my work.
Like so I arrived at the house of a warm and friendly woman, who after several negative replies, believing that she didn’t have anything of interest for my project, asked if I could wait a bit.
After a few minutes she came back holding something in her hands.
It was a worn-out wallet she had kept that belonged to her deceased son.
The work had reached its end.

Books in their original form with patent leather, poster and wallpaper covering and shelf

Patent leather on patent leather

Printed photographs under acrylic on top of a wooden table with backlight.

“Up to now, I have felt quite certain about the apathy of my memory, starting with the years of my childhood. But it has to be said that a sudden memory is loaded with an extraordinary power of evocation. The past does not content itself with dragging us back to it. Between all of our memories, there are some, and later even fewer, that in a certain way are equipped with powerful steel springs, and each time we touch them, they immediately let loose and catapult us into the future..” Yukio Mishima

“From the construction of taste” is a work that came about while I was visiting my parents’ house. Naptime during the holidays at the end of the year, all asleep and me going around the house, feeling strange at seeing it from a new perspective and perceiving for the first time the source of my interest in fetishism.

A house full of “useless” objects whose primary (or only) function was always to recreate the idea of HOME, the home that my mother imagined for our family.

Fetishism, accumulation and cataloging are ideas that hover over several of my works. In this case I wanted to take the idea a bit further, reproducing the objects in transparent acrylic (like spectres that have abandoned their bodies), taking them out of context, providing them with a place of “value” to which every fetish aspires and putting forth a paradoxical dialogue between objects of a suburban home and their representation in an institutional art space. The objects as triggers of memories, of life experiences and emotions; signs capable of making us understand where we come from and that give us clues as to where we are going.

Patent leather on MDF

Patent leather on patent leather

Polyptych, ink on patent leather

Ink on patent leather

Diptych
Digital photography
Direct shot

Patent leather on patent leather

Patent leather on patent leather and wood

Patent leather on patent leather

Installation of patent leather on wood

“Art provides two elements much more important than money in a society where institutions, hierarchies, names and even academic titles no longer carry weight: it provides prestige and exclusivity.
To be an art collector is to be part of the highest ranking VIP club on the planet. They are the select members who fly in private jets and who are received with a red carpet.” (Excerpt from Art is Now the Passion of the Masses, published in the Argentine newspaper La Nacion.

An installation that came about as a questioning of the vision that reduces art to a mere object of fetishism.
Based on a corner in my house dedicated to works by artists who interest me, where pieces of emerging artists such as Elena Dahn, Ana Clara Soler, Jazmín Berakha and Tamara Villoslada are in dialogue with experienced artists, such as Pablo Ziccarello, Marta Minujín, Hernán Marina, Fabiana Barreda, etc.
Over the course of a few years, letting desire be the main impetus at the moment of choosing, very far from collectors’ pretensions, a treasured collection of works in small format arranged itself.
The installation is made up of a replica that reproduces each one of the works on its actual scale, each one veiled behind a material that carries a huge sensual and fetishist weight: black patent leather.
Like a translation that is related to the original work but where its signs begin to talk about something else; where a new language appears with familiar sounds and echoes, but with a different intonation, taking on a different accent.
Where you could see a photo, a drawing, a painting, now you can only see an object, a bulk that conserves the form, in every centimeter and in its location, of the original; what was white is now black, in a relationship of mirrors and opposites.
Like the skin shed by a serpent, the work conserves it’s “body”, the shape, but it informs us that “the other” (what is important) is no longer there. Art as an object, art as fetish, the form being the contents.
A century before Damian Hirst made 200 million dollars in one auction, Oscar Wilde defined a cynic as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Patent leather

Paper and acrylic on wood

Clippings of pornographic magazines, paper and acrylic on MDF

paper on paper

Clippings of pornographic magazines, paper and acrylic on MDF

864 monochromatic photographs on MDF

344 monochromatic photographs and synthetic enamel on MDF

Pornographic magazine’s parts on Wood.

Pornographic magazine’s parts on Wood.

Authors: Daniel Juarez / Marina Ruesta
Digital photography
Direct shot

Authors: Daniel Juarez / Marcela Valero Narváez
Digital photography
Direct shot