Red Marten | València (EFE).- Javier Malavia and Joan Coderch met the “heritage heroes” when they saw on television those who protected, with plastic and paper, statues in Ukrainian cities to avoid their destruction by bombs, a wrap that both Awards Reina Sofía have turned into three solidarity sculptures.
These works are exhibited from this Friday in Valencia on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Russian invasion. The three pieces in the ‘Heroes of Heritage’ collection replicate that protection: three human forms that appear to be covered like Ukrainian sculptures, but with a golden hue, like a “treasure”, to give value to the act of safeguarding art.
In this way, the aim is to make visible “that what is below” the wrapper is as important as “what has been done above it,” Coderch and Malavia point out in an interview with EFE at the In Arte Veritas gallery, in the middle of center of Valencia, which inaugurates its space this Friday with works by different artists, among them the aforementioned homage to Ukraine that have come out of the workshop that both have in Riba-roja.
Uncover them when peace is restored
“When you see something like this, some images with that plastic force, it leaves you shocked and you try to assimilate it”, highlights Malavia, for whom the wrapping of the pieces “has the protection component but also the hope of being able to uncover them when the peace”.
For Coderch, turning this action into a sculpture is a way of “giving value to what all these people have done who risk their lives and their physique when they could be fleeing”, because they give priority to “protecting something that belongs to the whole world ”.
For this reason, Javier Malavia and Joan Coderch have given a supportive approach to these works, which are for sale in the gallery, and for each purchase they will allocate 10% of the amount to an entity in charge of heritage protection, to which add an additional 10% to be donated by the gallery.
From Cibeles to Petra
“This type of thing has to make us more sensitive, to prevent us from only remembering to protect heritage when we see it being destroyed,” considers Malavia, who laments: “When it is there and we have it in front of us, we don’t give it importance, and then we say: ‘we should have protected it’”.
These images of works of art destroyed in armed conflicts are not new, as the sculptor recalls how the destruction of heritage in Petra (Jordan) “turned his stomach” and also that this protection exercise was carried out in Spain during the Civil War, not only with the transfer of the works from the Prado Museum but also with monuments such as La Cibeles, around which a brick wall was even built.
“We imagine that the monuments are going to be forever but for that to be the case we have to do something, we cannot sit idly by,” says Joan Coderch, who believes that this begins with “respecting and valuing” the works that are in the street and that many times, in the cities, “end up being used as a swing or slide”.
Take the art to the street
The artists are in favor of taking art out onto the street, as they did in La Marina de València with their ‘Salt Giant’, a work that shows a man twisting in a posture of the Japanese Butoh dance, conceived as an icon of “ how to get up after falling” and who became a symbol of resistance after the pandemic and starred in thousands of photos on social networks.
Her ‘Walking in Beauty’ is also a symbol of strength, which represents a woman in a warrior posture that aims to make visible “the contemporary, daring woman”, who in this version has dreadlocks and a phoenix tattooed on her back, in contrast to to the femininity of his ‘Nereids’, protective creatures of the sea.
The collection exhibited at In Arte Veritas is completed by ‘Scarecrow’, a scarecrow like the one that appears in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and which, instead of driving away the birds, “accepts its problems to move forward on the road”.
write with mud
“The idea that we always have is to share a message, to retell something that we have seen or experienced and that we want to tell in our own way”, says Javier Malavia.
For Joan Coderch, sculpting is “a form of expression, just like that of someone who writes”, and in fact these artists prefer “writing with clay” to doing it with pen and paper.
All this to “create a culture” of sculpture, which, according to these 2017 Reina Sofía Awards (for his work “Hamlet”), involves bringing monuments closer to people, because “if they don’t see it, they won’t know never what they like and what they don’t, and many people think that entering a gallery is elitist”.
But both creators claim these exhibition spaces, which in their opinion “are much more dynamic and are renewed more often” than museums, which is why they call even the youngest to enter them.
About working in Valencia in particular, and in Spain in general, they acknowledge that they have done “better” in Europe, but they believe that there is “movement” and that the future is hopeful: “It’s like when something starts to boil and you see the first bubbles”.
