JOËL MESTRE

Castellón de la Plana 1966

Lives and works in Valencia

Linked to the neo-metaphysical painting resulting from his participation in Muelle de Levante (Levante Pier) exhibition. Linked to the Galería My Name’s Lolita Art.

Joël Mestre opposes the current visual contamination of a painting given to calm and seclusion as a strategy to slow down the gaze and enhance the slow and silent absorption of the image. His work focuses on constructive research related to the poetics of new social environment resulting from the development of new technologies.

An artificial and digital world where Mestre maps his territory through paintings based on reflection and pleasure of sensations and feelings. He seems to paint like the sound of words, revealing the dream features of daily life and unleashing the strangeness with visions of a classic, contemporary setting where he shows the eternal aspect of the objects of a late, dispassionate and unsettling modernity.

Studying Marshall McLuhan directed his first forays into the global village where the artist draws on resources of the medium like the brightness of neon colors or digital rich iconographic repertoire from the culture of the masses and design. His proposal for a new, extraterritorial and timeless pictorial space is comprised of keys from the cyber environment, the universality of the signs or cosmopolitanism of languages.

Mestre is identified with a new conception of painting enriched by the contributions from the complicity of other fields, such as literature or technology, that have managed to release cargos such as manners, virtuosity or mere documentary record .

The painter seems to talk about others in order to talk about himself, which happens with his readings of the Metaphysics painting by Alberto Savinio. His quotes are intoxicated in a peculiar sense of humor, between surreal and absurd, where the daily joins the mysterious, the banal and the sublime, with the goal of building a coherent and subtle plastic universe where the story is heightened in category.

His imagination sorts out the media images using references that are, as unmistakable as they are indecipherable logic, laden with slogans and saturated with meaning and so, converting his pictures into hermetically open and pure enigmas.

He develops his paintings in a dilated series to convey his world and his history, forming a particular painting program which is the “Mestre” area. A kind of atlas, always incomplete, where the different sections are related to a relative and imprecise way.

His themes include reflections on the aesthetics of technology and communication. But also, a poetic vision of everyday actions and the role of the sedentary traveler or virtual browser of modern man. As a passenger in transit or a computer nomad that explores the aesthetics of the trip. From the important influence exercised by the writer Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, it is important to highlight the pictorial figure Wreck, formulated as a fragment of a reality whose knowledge can only be partial.

Among the pictorial references the following painters are highlighted: Alberto Savinio, Edward Ruscha or Alex Katz.

Consulted bibliography: Forriols, Ricardo, “Simulador (de altos vuelos), in the exhibition catalogue Joël Mestre, Marvazelanda, Valencia, Colegio Mayor Rector Peset, 2007. Bonet, Juan Manuel, “Un pintor ya imprescindible”, in the exhibition catalogue Joël Mestre y Teresa Cebrián, Valencia, Sala Parpalló, 1995. Mestre, Joël, “Los balcones de Telépolis”, in the exhibition catalogue Joël Mestre, Los balcones de Telépolis, Valencia, Club Diario Levante, 1999. Rodríguez Marcos, Javier, “De la torre de marfil a la torre de control”, in the exhibition catalogue Joël Mestre, Como párpados en las orejas, Madrid, My Name’s Lolita Art, 2000.