Un tratamiento superficial is the title of the exhibition that Juan López (Alto Maliaño, 1979) presents in la Capilla and Room 9 of the museum. The exhibition consists of two interventions—one in each space—through which he appeals to the history of the site, its various presents, and the intuition of possible futures. Juan López’s career has been marked by the boldness with which he has always approached the specific. His interventions consistently convey a reference— whether subtle or overt—to a conscious and attentive way of being in the world. It is often said that every artistic stance must, by necessity, be political. Today, there is in fact a prominent trend toward giving a literal image or form to this political way of being, with the ensuing contradictions that arise when such literalness enters the commercial circuit. This is not the case with Juan López, whose understanding of his practice is rooted in an attachment to the modest and unpretentious nature of everyday trades—tools from which he also borrows to evoke that authentic life that Claire Etcherelli spoke of in her remarkable book about the working women of Paris.

The formal pretext López engages with in Room 9 is the original fresco found in the lunette of the back wall. Part of the surface has suffered the expected wear and tear of time. There is an archaeological exercise at play here, through which the space’s past is unearthed. He also employs—in Room 9 and in the Chapel alike—a recurring device in his work: turning the fragment, the shred of a form, into a sort of personal typography with which he constructs an alphabet, and thereby suggests the possibility that the spaces he intervenes in can be read. These fragments and potential typographies are created using an industrial method—pressurized sandblasting—which strips the plaster from the wall and reveals unexpected tonalities stemming from both recent and distant pasts, in a diligent excavation of the place’s memory. López has abstracted images from the fresco (an entablature, part of a capital, a saint’s halo...) as well as from already-empty areas, eroded by time.

In la Capilla, López presents another approach, no less his own. This is a space charged with ambivalence—a place, if you will, bastardized. A great deal of research went into this intervention, as he explored the rhythm of the arches, the possible inflection of the ribbing, the additions and palimpsests that these gave rise to. He visited the chapel of the National Museum of Sculpture, after architect Juan Carlos Arnuncio, who remodeled the museum’s Chapel, suggested he would find key insights there.

The architecture of the Chapel has undergone an extraordinary renovation, yet it leaves many loose ends in terms of the meaning and rhythm of its elements: truncated arches, diffuse ribs, a connection with the cloister wing that might seem plausible, though entirely imprecise... The artist quickly became aware of this sense of estrangement and accepted that time had freely layered different stylistic periods upon one another. This is precisely what López clings to, proposing—through fiction—contemporary construction elements: industrial trusses that stand out for their neutrality and standardized nature. In some way, these trusses act as signs, which the artist always pursues. In this case, with their triangular shape, they might well evoke guillemets, parentheses, brackets, or other punctuation marks— analogous to the way López gives rhythm to space.

There is something striking about the workmanship of these structures: they emerge from the original stone, sharing its texture, evoking a temporal wink and the suggestion that these modular structures may have always been there, as a continuation of the broken ribs of the space. If the intervention in Room 9 seeks out pasts through an image—the fresco—damaged by time, the Chapel presents a powerful counterpoint, as López introduces possible new formal solutions that contribute to the stylistic layers accumulated over centuries of architectural evolution. The trusses are industrial and standardized elements, lacking the sense of originality, uniqueness, and prestige we tend to associate with historic architecture. Always inclined to play against the grain, Juan López inserts these forms into the conversation around the classicism that dazzles in this museum, stirring up the norm, contradicting the canon.

Juan López’s work displays a variety of reflections on public space and architecture, art in the city and institutional critique, through gestures that compose and reveal layers and layers of meanings and symbols. Through the simple action of subverting, be it a form, a structure or an idea, he lets the material express the way in which human perception of reality is shaped by lived experience and its environment. This alteration generated by the artist’s act gives rise to new meanings of common places such as a wall, a house, a car, which abandon their original status to become tools for the disruption of symbolic power. In López’s work, the presence of the human being is never formalised in a plastic or conceptual way, however, the act of intervening on a given place and working with what is found there, refers to the presence of the human body and all its attributes, also altering its way of perceiving and situating itself in space.

His interest in calligraphy and in the graphism of the symbols we use to communicate comes from its potential for agency with its presence in space, which is a reference to the typographic quality of architectural decorations. Collage also occupies a central place in his thinking and is closely linked to his interest in language and composition through superimposition, subtraction, alternation of a form or a discourse.