JORDI TRAPERHO OR NEW ARTISTS

(recognition and admiration)

The change in the view of the world that theories and practises on knowledge of our environment have implied, has turned out, since the second half of the 19th Century, in the apparition of a new kind of artist—however, it was detected in other times of history. This new kind of artists do not match those who dedicated to simply depict the so-called objective reality and praise its positive qualities. These new artists are especially oriented towards the most sensitive and emotional side of a person, and the way that they influence society is according to some symbolist approaches—knowledge by suggested, suggestive or intriguing allusive analogies. They are also presented as prophets, as they detect and reveal unprecedented possible futures or all kinds of old realities that they recuperate. There is also the way of the neo-realists and neo-objectivists, who depict the same as always, but with new meanings. Finally, we can also find some artists of pure imaginary: those who depict objectivities—fetishes, in some way—that only they detected.

Jordi Traperho is an excellent representative of all these variations of plastic and/or poetic expression, besides some others. He is an adventurer of sculpture and the contents which undoubtedly  mean creation and/or the presence of a shape in our sensitive environment.

With Traperho you never know if plastic impact is first, or if it is the imaginary that moves and touches him. The shapes in which he represents his plastic realities and/or his textual content, has he extracted them from his conscious mind, his subconscious or from a Jungian collective subconscious? Or does it come from a personal transcendent revelation, or maybe a social one? We will never know, but the fact is that he acts with promptness, decision, determination and gestural, verbal or sound imperativeness. He always does that with certainty in order to reveal himself, to capture or claim what he is showing, which he executes by all possible means at his reach, from the classic arts like painting and sculpture to more modern formats in paper, synthetic and—lately—electronic.

Here is my appreciation of his personality, and I would like to congratulate him for these 25 issues of his “7 miralls al dau 1”. I want also thank him for all the occasions in which he has used his artist means to also acclaim my work.

Arnau Puig      Bcn, 07-05-2015    

TRAPERHO OR THE COSMIC SENSITISING OF OBJECTS THROUGH ARTISTIC ACTION

Jordi Traperho is an artistic voyage of about 30 years duration, which could be divided into stages that represent different themes upon which he reflects, ranging from those where he ponders his very existence as a man as an artist, to those where he shows what happens around him, offers us what he experiences, what moves him and what he feels affects his own human intimacy.

 His art, which so often uses the unusable left-overs of civilisation and the inevitable consumerism of subsistence, as support, and through the appropriate selection and treatment of materials using in each case apt aesthetic criteriae, reflects both the immediate surroundings, and the chaos of the world in which the artist lives and works, and at the same time everything which happens to and affects him and other human beings, however controversial and contradictory they might be.

Traperho feels he is an artist/painter/poet who is inspired by facts and circumstances some of which provoke in him an impulse to convert into three dimensional objects his ideas, feelings and reflections.

From the moment in which he feels affected in this way, and which produces artistic creations that are an exteriorisation into both actions and shapes, his work could be called pop-art; art which consists of turning everyday objects into forms of art.

In this way Traperho’s world creates a symbolic world, apparently substituting the real one, but which in reality is his profound aesthetic version of it, and in which lies its real meaning.

The duality between aesthetic reality and symbolism is what gives the work of this artist its strength, which, as we have already said, comes from a mind that feels inspired and which draws no on the social, but from the real situation of man in the cosmos, given that the social structure is what puts to the test the real content and dimension of everything and everybody.

To reaches these levels Traperho bipasses the personal incidences of freudianism and surrealism in order to convert his interior needs into the expression and exteriorisation of a being and a collective sense of existence, authentic agony in which everything assumes a radical feeling. His work is an art of extremes which he unifies and tries to synthesise in a long conscious process manifesting itself in an immense collage of ideas and objects.

 Arnau Puig. Art Crític. 1997

Catalogue of the retrospective exhibition Jordi Traperho 1967-1997.

An artistic practice. Sant Cugat del Vallés