The Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection is changing spaces, thus beginning a new period. The occasion seemed propitious to mark a pause and to ask its founder/author, Juan Carlos Maldonado, to reflect on what his processes were; what his initial premises were; which works were those that began his journey; and how, progressively, the collection went from a Latin American one to, in a word, a universal one which welcomes within its bosom the work of artists working in different countries and continents, all of whom, nonetheless, share a common passion: the rigor of geometric shapes and the quiet poetry that characterizes them.
Every collection requires time; and it has its times because it demands from its author a maturity of gazing that cannot be obtained without effort, or without constant reflection upon that which is to be acquired and on why it is to be obtained. Because the human eye is not a mechanical tool, and the gaze does not stop at the simple reception of an external stimulus, retinal as it is sometimes called. While it is true that looking certainly involves the human eye, it also, and above all, necessitates the brain – that which alone sees, which alone, gazes.
Hence, in the gesture of the collector who acquires a work because it holds his gaze, an entire life is expressed, including the waits, the doubts, and the joys of the one who looks on – all of that and not just an optical phenomenon. The Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection in Time The Rigor of Geometric Shapes constitutes, for this very reason, an attempt to give museological form to both a collector’s processes and to that curious materialization of the soul in a series of works that are spun together, and that little by little weave a network of meaning – a way of enrolling ourselves in the world and of saying what we are and what we think.
Ariel Jiménez
Curator