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.”
A collaboration between Galería Justo Giner, located in the heart of Madrid, and the space directed by Isolina Arbulu in Marbella forms the origin of this project. Both galleries converge in a proposal that moves beyond the traditional exhibition format and unfolds as an exhibition performance: a living event with its own temporality, where artwork, space, and viewer activate one another.
This exhibition performance takes place over just ten days, echoing the fast pulse of the city that inspires it. Upon entering the space, the visitor steps into a concentrated, layered Madrid, folded in on itself like a navigable labyrinth. The exhibition becomes a city, and the city becomes an experience—one that is walked, inhabited, remembered. It is not merely something to be viewed, but something to be crossed through.
It is within this framework that the work of Javier de Juan is situated. Painter and storyteller, he has made Madrid both his material and his ongoing field of invention. His practice stems from a fundamental premise: to live is to move. Madrid—restless, uninterrupted—embodies this dynamic energy. In De Juan’s images, architecture, light, rhythm, and collective memory weave together to reveal a city that draws and erases itself endlessly, generating new outlines over its own traces.
Here, Madrid emerges as a labyrinth; intimate and infinite, simultaneous and ever-changing. A territory folded into a single exhibition space, allowing the viewer to walk the city without ever leaving the room. Each piece acts as a bifurcation, a passageway, a pulse within a map that rewrites itself in motion. The ephemeral and the mutable are not exception but essence.
