Javier de Juan in the Labyrinth of Madrid: A performative exhibition at Yusto / Giner, Madrid
“Javier de Juan presents at Yusto Giner a performative exhibition that mirrors Madrid itself: dynamic, ephemeral, and perpetually reinventing its own image.”
From Galería Isolina Arbulu, and in collaboration with Galería Justo Giner (Madrid), we present a performative exhibition by Javier de Juan. This project moves beyond the boundaries of a traditional show to become a living work: one activated in real time through the encounter between artwork, space, and viewer.
For ten days only, the gallery transforms into a condensed, walkable Madrid — layered, simultaneous, folded into itself like a labyrinth. The city becomes the exhibition, and the exhibition becomes an experience to be crossed rather than merely observed. The visitor does not just look; they enter, move, and inhabit the work.
Javier de Juan —painter, visual storyteller, and chronicler of Madrid— constructs this performative exhibition from a premise that underpins his practice: to live is to move. Madrid, incessant and electric, embodies this principle. In his visual language, architecture, light, rhythm, and collective memory merge, revealing a city that draws and erases itself endlessly, reshaping its contours over the traces that precede it.
In this space, Madrid emerges as a labyrinth — intimate yet vast, fixed yet continuously shifting. The viewer becomes both witness and traveler, navigating the work as one navigates a city. Each piece functions as a path, a turn, a pulse within a map in constant revision. Here, ephemerality is not a byproduct; it is the essence.
