Daniel Joglar (Vitamin 3-D / New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installations)

Vitamin 3-D / New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installations,  Phaidon Press, 2009.

Daniel Joglar

What comes across immediately in the work of Daniel Joglar is his sense of economy. His habit of using whatever is available, together with his deep and long-sustained impulse to hoard odd and disparate found objects without premeditated intention, could have led his installations to excess. But his inherent gift for poetic harmony guides his decisions judiciously throughout each work’s development.

Joglar’s regional culture and academic pursuits in chemistry, architecture, theology and philosophy are profoundly imbedded in his work. His decision to become an artist, triggered by an ongoing search for meaning, earned him a place in the Studio Program for the Visual Arts in Buenos Aires, an artists’ residency created by Guillermo Kuitca. The two years spent working in this context reinforced the penchant for experimentation he had acquired during his chemistry studies. While some of his colleagues lost themselves in this open-ended atmosphere, Joglar put to good use his chemistry experience, especially in the careful consideration of weight and measures.

His first table installations of simple stationary items were shown in a group exhibition at the Centro Cultural Borges in Buenos Aires. This event was followed by ‘Geografía’ in 2001, at the Dabbah Torrejón gallery, a show that held its own in terms of style and commitment, though unconsciously rooted in the River Plate constructive art tradition. Reams of pastel-coloured office paper in slightly undulating piles represented the different layers of land as it is conventionally drawn in diagrams. Pieces of tree trunk were sliced to show the age of the tree, while a wall installation of pick-up sticks closely followed the way they had fallen when dropped on the floor.  

Ants, spiders and bees’, an exhibition of table installations at the Centro Cultural Borges in 2004, was inspired in Sir Francis Bacon’s theories on how the different methods in which scientists work resemble that of ants, who collect, spiders, who knit their webs with their own substance, and bees who gather material and transform it.  In ‘Distant Sounds’, Joglar’s 2005 show at Dabbah Torrejón, he showed clean-cut minimal objects sparsely laid out on small classic French-style tables. These cryptic arrangements evoked religious enigmas in the manner of cabbalistic riddles.

In 2006 Joglar liberated his work from a given surface by creating mobiles made up of light rods and circles, which swing in the air at the slightest breeze. In the same year, he mounted his first exhibitions abroad: at the Pontevedra Biennial in Spain and at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. For Pontevedra – a traditional Catholic fishing town – Joglar hung a large fishing net woven with green luminescent rosaries, showing once more his grasp of the essential and the immediate.  His latest work includes periodic tables, an overt acknowledgement of his chemistry background and of his need to classify and systematize the objects that he so adroitly displays.

 

Alina Tortosa