hurrengoa
javier riera: infringed light    Born in Aviles (Asturias) works, teaches and lives in Madrid. His artwork was based in paintings until eight years ago when he started doing interventions with light projections directly on landscapes. Since we discovered his work, at night, we look differently to open landscapes. When and in response to what did you move on from painting and start working directly on nature, using projectors and lights?

The way to understand my painting has always been connected with nature for dif- ferent reasons. For one thing, the paintings at home when I was a child were by my great-grandfather, the Basque Jose Salís, who painted incredible seascapes and landscapes. What’s more, the landscape you experience as a child is decisive, and I say ‘experience’ because there’s more than just looking in the relationship between a child and a landscape. In Asturias, where I lived, the landscape, as well as being a physical space, was a continual, unending methodological phenomenon in its profound changes. I’d say that in my case painting has become an image over recent years, it has become less interesting and significant as an object and in the traditional pictorial tradition, and more appropriate in terms of perception of reality.

Compared with painting, it has the transparent quality of photography, the width of the means of transmission is reduced. Obviously, a photographer’s approach decides the frame and landscape, but from a painter’s eyes, adding that moment’s desire and the brush strokes which psychology brings, a gesture of greater or lesser scale, the chance for chromatic harmony, freshness and pictorial insistence, many significant details which cannot be taken up by a camera or realism.

Land Art has been dominated by photographers from the start, and, even if unwillingly, it has created a “genre”, in fact, the area where I see my own work, which aims to be a register of interventions, and also photographs in themselves. It is what I take in the photograph, that is what gives my images their basic meaning.

The first time I saw your projections on landscapes and trees I was reminded of Bioy Casares’ “La Invención de Morel”. In your work, artifices - the projector - are part of the work itself and the projection process - technology in human hands - becomes part of that nature, more than just a reflection of nature... I may be wrong, but it seems to be a development which goes beyond what we usually call Land Art...

It’s strange you should mention that book. When I was studying Fine Art my friends and I read it with great interest. That relationship between nature and artifice is particularly important in many artists’ work. The world does not exist for us if we do not represent it and interpret it and, in the same way, we project psychic contents onto everything that we perceive.

I’m always astonished by the extent to which people think of photographs as the real image of reality. Land Art has influenced me so much that whenever I look at photo- graphs I always think that they are pictures of works which I have never seen with my own eyes, something far away in our DNA’s desert, places it’s difficult to get to, but, all of a sudden, they turn up in books about the history of art and, when we see one, we feel that we’ve understood the essence of the work. In reality, the photo tells us about a work but, above all, the work remains in the spectator’s brain.

You project geometrical images above all...

The relationship between geometry and oases was extensively worked on in architecture and sculpture at the start of the 20th century. In both cases, the material which forms geometry in those media is physical in character. In my work, it is important for the material which draws that geometry to be light and to be intangible.
I’m interested in investigating the subtlety of the physical quality in that relationship. I’d define it as resonance because that concept is the best possible definition of the irregularity of landscape and the precision of geometry, the effect I try to achieve by combining such different visual languages. Anything that can happen in landscape can be described using mathematics, physics and geometry. The same is true of measur- able invisible energy. I think there is a design, using geometry, to make the energy of material visible. That is why that relationship between landscape and geometry offers us a reflection of the harmony which reality hides from us.

Do you look for action in itself (its short-lived reflection in the landscape), or is projecting just a way of obtaining photographic images?

One of the main possibilities in photography is registering an event, and for me it’s extraordinary that what has happened is there in my photographs, showing it was a place and a time. I think that Land Art creates a new genre in photography whether it likes it or not: the intervention the landscape has been subjected to, my photos are an attempt to register that event, and, at the same time, they are photographs with their own character.

When you see the interventions live, they’re much more spectacular than what you see in the photos, so some basic sensations are sacrificed in the photographs. Photos are always there to climb between your eye and your brain, to make it an intervention for your whole body.