Como en casa (Just Like Home)

Considered one of Spain’s leading video installation artists today, Jordi Colomer began his career in sculpture. His triple training as an architect, artist and art historian enabled him to link formal volumes to an ironic critique of the very status of contemporary art and its institutions, while reflecting on popular forms as critical tools for analysing the languages established by modernity.
As José Luis Brea wrote, Como en casa speaks of a positive a!rmation of the home, the private space that is in reality ‘a space of opacity, of reserve ... impenetrable’. The apparently cold, rationalist forms of the installation are dotted with affective elements, objects placed above and below them, to create a space of representation that coincides with the museum space, one where life is not divided but present and through which the viewer can pass. Colomer mentions the feeling of opacity we experience when looking at a house in the city: ‘The façade is finally reconciled in dissolving into the social, to show itself to the outside world, foreshadowing the expectations of life that will move within it.’ His interest, to paraphrase the same critic, was in whispering in the ear of those who feel, reminding them of the need to have a life of their own, not alienated in the public management of identities to which culture pushes us, through works in which there is a deliberate concealment of records of privacy.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio