Nauzet Mayor at Galería Fran Reus

Artist: Nauzet Mayor

Exhibition title: Llegar al fallo

Venue: Galería Fran Reus, Mallorca, Spain

Date: March 20 – June 5, 2020

Photography: Grimalt de Blanch / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Galería Fran Reus, Mallorca

Muscle failure is a Fitness concept that consists of the inability of muscle fibers to generate the necessary force and overcome the resistance presented by a load, making it impossible to perform m ore repetitions of the exercise. Thanks to this process, an increase in growth hormone occurs w hen the body returns to rest.

As an athlete that approaches failure during training to promote the growth process, Nauzet Mayor intends to go further, to get a little closer to a result that validates his effort and gives him some clue to discover and walk new trails. This project arises from a point of rest, an intermediate space between the culmination of a job and the beginning of a new one.

The body has been the epicenter in the artist’s previous works and from there he takes up this new stage. The different parts of the body are the germ of something new, which expands and gives rise to new life and new phenomena, already far rem oved from the story of his daily life, to focus now on contemplating the duality of temporality and eternity. From the body as a central element, he tries to build a story that refers to symbolic phenomena that connect the viewer with the present moment, the here and now . For this, the artist has developed a set of pieces that represent a body: head, trunk and limbs. Each body element is in its ow n orbit in relation to other assembled objects producing its own history apart from the others.

Figuratively, reaching failure also refers to the collapse, error or cessation of operation as the behavior of a body properly conceived, without the need to external supports. In this sense, references to ailments can be seen, treated as a result of the continuous repetition of an activity, in this case the artistic one.

The outbreak of the SARS- CoV- 2 pandemic has given this project an additional reading during its development, already focused on the body and its biochemical and physiological processes. The idea of latent life of different microorganism s subordinate to a m ore com plex or complete organism or sim ply usable for other biological agents is present in this project as mosses, textures and objects added to the body figures. The body that is resurrected but is no longer the original body and houses other form s of life beyond hum an control such as bacteria or fungi.

In appearance, this work appears to us as a kind of contemporary sculpture garden that constantly refers us to the origin of all suffering and enjoyment: the body itself. Through the creation of an immersive environment, the viewer encounters the pieces in a w ay that is far rem oved from the traditional linear arrangement of objects in the exhibition space. The encounter with the works takes place within a zone of isolation in order to create a feeling of assistance to a phenomenon that is taking place in situ only for whoever is in front of each piece at that moment.