Exhibition: "quiñones: to the origin"
Estepona City Council announces that the exhibition "Quiñones: Al Origen" will open this Friday at the Mirador del Carmen. This is the first solo exhibition dedicated to the artist Juan Miguel Quiñones, who has achieved international acclaim and rave reviews for his monumental marble sculptures of objects that are highly representative of summer.
This exhibition, which will be open to the public starting Saturday, August 2, brings together 180 marble sculptures depicting iconic symbols of the summer season, such as ice cream, beach toys, snorkeling fins, surfboards, and scooters.
Quiñones' sculptures, made from the noblest material of classical tradition, produce monumental simulacra, life-size or oversized, of all those objects that are great icons of summer and that form part of the sentimental memories of viewers who visit the exhibition.
The exhibition curators, Mariella Franzoni and Flor Reiners, point out that "the utopia of summer and time frozen between beach, sun, and play" are the focus of this exhibition, where we can enjoy sculptures created using a variety of techniques: from diamond saw cutting to Renaissance-style inlay work. Both consider this artistic output to be "the fruit of a practice deeply connected to the tradition of stonemasonry and manual marble work, and influenced by the quarries of Vejer de la Frontera, the artist's hometown."
The exhibition, which will be open until December 14, is intended as a symbolic reunion between the artist and Estepona, the city where he grew up and develops his work, and at the same time as the intersection of two parallel perspectives: one on the work of a sculptor who, by making marble a ductile material, has built a cult around the iconic objects of childhoods in the 1990s; the other, on the recent history of a region (the Costa del Sol), which has nourished the widowed style and collective memory of those who have inhabited this landscape, reinvented for the consumption of a summer utopia.
Through a wide selection of works – some created specifically for this exhibition and others from private collections – the exhibition is structured into six thematic sections: Origin, Sketches, The Summer Factory, Punta de la Plata, Sea and Mountains, and When the Sun Heats Up. Six scenes or fragments of an emotional topography that intertwine the artist's personal memory with the collective urban imagination of the city.
Within the framework of this meeting, the work of Juan Miguel Quiñones is closely linked to the history of a region of the Andalusian Costa del Sol and its "architecture of pleasure"—in the words of Henri Lefebvre and his Spanish disciple, Mario Gaviria. "That is, the tourist urbanism that, beginning in the 1960s, configured new landscapes designed for leisure and consumption, projecting unprecedented ways of inhabiting, experiencing, and thinking about the world from peripheries that, during the summer months, become objects of desire for the inhabitants of large European and global cities in search of relaxation," according to Mariella Franzoni and Flor Reiners.
In this context, Quiñones's work, which has received high praise from international art critics, can be read as "a sensitive archaeology of an era, a territory, and a memory shared by those who have inhabited or traveled through this landscape."
This contextual reading is intertwined with a look at Quiñones’ (1979) sculptural production over the past fifteen years, “a generous and coherent body of work that reveals how his practice, founded on a self-taught technical wisdom, is sustained by the slow process of form, where thought is constructed through doing, trial and error, and physical sacrifice; that is, through an atavistic memory that is reactivated in the body and its gestures.”
In recent years, Quiñones's work has transcended borders, being exhibited in various galleries and art fairs in the United States, Europe, and China. His practice, deeply rooted in material and gesture, has resonated internationally, confirming the power of a sculptural language that, through its intimacy and craftsmanship, manages to engage with the universal.
The exhibition can be visited from Tuesday to Sunday, from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. and from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Free admission for residents of the city.