Javier Garcerá. Its Beak Windward

From 18 December until 3 April 2026, CentroCentro presents a large installation of paintings by Javier Garcerá that interact with the space within CentroCentro, creating an immersive and sensory experience for the public.

This exhibition plays carefully and cleverly with lighting, making it an essential component in the experience. Some of these paintings are monumental in scale, echoing the idea of an altarpiece, created specifically for the exhibition, while other pieces have been painted by the artist over the last thirty years of his career, highlighting his coherence both formally and conceptually, as well as ethically and politically.

Javier Garcerá (Puerto de Sagunto, 1967) is an artist whose pictorial work stands out for its aesthetic coherence and poetic depth. Through complex technical and formal registers that he has been developing throughout his extensive career, his painting embodies a subtle visual power that makes is truly and recognisably unique in the context of contemporary art.

The artist takes a critical, yet poetic, stance towards the dizzying pace of modern life, in which the consumption of dozens of images per second is making our gaze increasingly superficial and scarcely reflective. The Valencian artist proposes another way of looking at things in an alternative manner, positioning ourselves in relation to the world, and tackling the things and events that surround us. He invites us to slow down, take our time and look into the depths of paintings in which we see ourselves and enter without realising it. However, his most recent paintings encourage us to enter frame by frame, so that our gaze ricochets back towards our own centre, towards the understanding that we are physically and spiritually in a specific place and moment.

References to painting—Fra Angelico, Manet—are interwoven with iconographies related to the artist’s workspace, his everyday and emotional life, and the representation of abandoned nature, architectures in ruins or in the midst of change. Curated by Isabel Tejeda, 'El pico al aire' [Bare to the Air] is an allegory of the times of crisis in which we live, and a poetic critique that encourages us to contemplate reflectively as a means of ethical and civic self-awareness. A particular 'homecoming' in which silence is another subject omitted from the exhibition.

Image credits:

"El pico al aire" [ Bare to the Air] (detail), 2025 © Javier Garcerá, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025. Acrylic temple on synthetic silk. Photo credit: Juan Baraja