Javier Carro Temboury in an artist and sculptor we met at JUSTMAD contemporary art show, shortly before Corona changed our lives.

A bit about yourself.
After completing school in Madrid, I decided to start a path on my own and went to art university in Paris. This city and its Beaux-Arts academy have been very special platforms for exploring in my practice. In parallel, I am also closely involved in an art gallery in Madrid called Aspa Contemporary, which we’ve been running together with my father and brother for 3 years. This year I moved to Hamburg, benefiting from the studios of HfbK university, a great opportunity to pitch up with what Germany offers.

Greatest inspirations or influences?

• My first and longest contact with culture, without a doubt, is growing up to an artist-architect father.

• I’m a big consumer of literature, probably the work of Roberto Bolaño or Luis Martin-Santos have touched me the most.

• There are plenty other path-changing artists: Picabia, Guston, Robert Morris, list goes on…

Naturally, I am an updated follower of current art scene, but I would rather visit first the archeological sites or a modernist church when arriving to a new city. White cubes can get very tiring and nonsense. I’m constantly reading random stuff, as when we try to understand art’s role in society, we are quickly switch to many other fields like history, technical knowledges, superstitions, politics… They’re everywhere. Paradoxically we can draw a lot of conclusions about role of art while sitting in an airport cafeteria, surrounded by all its dull graphic signs.

 Tell us about your creative process, how does it begin? 

 Ideas often come after exciting encounters. That’s why strolling is crucial for me -see Baudelaire’s Flaneur-. I would first start by walking around -without expectations but with senses wide open- through a city, library or any daily life experience. If something stimulates my attention, I will scribble a note or take a picture.

Then a big part takes place in the studio, where I assemble them into more concrete proposals.

The ideas enter in a dialog with their context. Also choosing the physical material contributes a lot to these dialectic process, confronting new accidents and state changes. This is the reason why- I’m so appealed to craft or elaborate techniques, like printmaking or ceramics. The process of making becomes suddenly a way of thinking by itself, specific to each medium.

After this, I would hang the pieces on the wall and let them cool for some weeks, thinking what to include or change.

I usually keep different projects in parallel, so if get stuck with one I can switch my mindset to something else and then come back with fresher eyes. I enjoy collaborative work as well.

 What are the themes and topics of your trajectory of work?

I constantly work mixing codes from here and there. Appropriation is a very interesting tool, which implies playing with pre-existing material. Something as cooking with what’s already in the fridge. Every material has a problematic of their own, so very effective stuff can come out of a proper mix.

 It’s hard to set a general thread or topic, because I have a very distracted practice; I usually keep several projects growing independently within separated fields of interest. The title of my last solo show was Abreuvoir, a French word for naming the place where all different animals drink water in a farm. I thought about it as a real commonplace where all species would meet each other around a common activity. The idea of exhibition space as such, was a strategy for bringing together works of distinct genre, but also a real invitation for viewers to join the drinking place and refresh. And if we keep playing with the metaphor: what would be the exhibition’s equivalent to the Abreuvoir’s drinking water?

I think this was a good hint for further work, because it allowed multi-faceted thoughts to coexist without being unified or flattened. And I’m convinced that specially in nowadays context, an honest display according to your workflow -in art or other practices- is a political stance.

For my latest ceramic sculptures, I’ve been studying systems of conducts, from cables or pipes to our own blood/digestive system. Then I initiated this wall reliefs modelling structure-like shapes with two colored clays. They passed from drawings to three-dimensional objects very intuitively. The final pieces look rough and still, like some sort of nonsense technologies made from archaic materials.

I enjoy leaving an open end to the pieces, so anyone can project their thoughts on it. Speaking about series or how it’s made is interesting, but ultimately the game is about the very particular piece in front of you, where “what you see is what you see” quoting the master F. Stella. So that’s why at some point I just stop disturbing with explanations, and let the piece stand by itself.

 And of course, there’s pleasure – trivial as it sounds- as the biggest common denominator in my art making.

 Favourite websites, social media handles?

• I check often Bomb magazine for nice interviews.

• Ubuweb is a great database and allows deep attention to contents.

Anything else you would like to share?

In these strange times and always, never give a break to sensibility. Pull something new out of everyday