Keiseki: Traces, evidence, prints. A Japanese word formed by kei, scene and seki, stone. It derives from the term Suiseki that is used to talk about rocks and stones which due to their natural shape arrive to emulate in our mind landscapes, objects, animals…, images. These rocks are valued and even venerated since they are able to suggest forms that tend to mimic what exists in nature. The human being doesn’t intervene in these representations and when he does he only does it to give that status. This representation is understood as an emergence of what once wasn’t and from that moment “is”, by subjective determination.

Juanli Carrión “finds” landscapes that have already been contaminated by human intervention. The artist chooses them to subsequently change them, recreating scenarios that remind us of images that are similar to something unreal, futuristic, like the shots of a science fiction film.

They are scenarios stranded in a sort of non-place, lost and seemingly foreign to civilization. However, according to the artist himself, they show “the erratic reality of human being”. Traces, remains of an unfinished process that the artist takes up to make it artistic. Kei: scene that represents a colorist spectacle that is intended to reconsider the nature of the landscape found and with that, the nature of the spectacle itself. By giving the last twist to the mimetic game, the artist sees in these constructions that seem “real”, a reference to Suiseki. The only difference is that this is a Land-Art intervention which rather than mediate in what is natural it acts on what was already artificial. The result, disturbing images that ironically refer to the deforming appropriationism the western view applies to eastern culture and which here extends to all intrusions of the exotic.

Carrión takes the stones found in that non-place from their status as uncanny elements and grants them artistic autonomy. Representing them, he creates them because he doesn’t copy them; he only transforms them to make them different by converting them into the piece itself. Piece that is never a reproduction of something real but the anticipation of what didn’t exist before, that explains his capacity to open up to a world of fiction that is self-sufficient.

The project continues with the Kigata-ishi, sculptures made of concrete that, again, emerge from this tension between natural and artificial. They are cactus that grow in the portrayed landscape, or they are rather a representation made of cement; because mimesis, since Aristoteles, is not only an imitation of the real, but also an artifice, an elaboration by the poet of the real. They are sculptures that accurately reproduce the cactus despite the artificiality of the material. When he moves them to the exhibition space and turns them into an installation, Carrión adds elements that are intended to emphasize their non-naturalness, like the blue neon lights or the smoke that surrounds the pieces and invades the room.

But Carrión doesn’t stop here, he makes one last turn and put his Kigata-ishi back to the landscape in which they were found, making a new intervention in the territory of “the natural”. The concrete copies return to live with their original ones, to reveal the development of a process to rethink the relationship between art and reality or the mysteries of the representation. The artist photographs this contaminated landscape to document the action that closes the project and so completes a labyrinth of mirrors, of simulations and of tension between truth and simulacrum.

Carrión separates his work from reality, and by reversing the rules of representation he establishes a game of appearances and confusions that end up placing art inside an ontological reality that highlights the ability of any language to go beyond itself.