Juan Gómez Alemán is the creative director of La Juan Gallery. He is also a freelance cultural manager, exhibition curator, playwright and stage director, driven by a deep curiosity for life and self-education.

Alex Delacroix is the Transavantgarde personified: audiovisual artist, filmmaker, actress, comedian, co-director of La Juan Gallery, gender fluid activist, occasional model and generational icon. 

Historia del arte contemporáneo is the title of the joint project by Juan Gómez Alemán and Alex Delacroix, in which five local authors and dancers give free rein to performances intended to make viewers reflect on the subjective nature of the art market. The finishing touch was a collaborative performance with local artists, which also served as a sort of creative twinning act.

A Fine Arts graduate from the University of Granada, Ydáñez has given workshops along with Juán Genovés and Mitsuo Miura, among others. He has received important distinctions and is one of Spain’s most internationally renowned painters. He has been awarded scholarships by the Ministry of Culture’s Colegio de España in Paris (2001), the Marcelino Botín Foundation (1998), the Academia de España in Rome (2016) and the 33rd BMW Painting Prize (2018).

He has held exhibitions at the CAC (Málaga), Villa di Livia (Rome), Whitebox Art Center (Beijing), Museo Lázaro Galdiano (Madrid), Dillon Gallery (New York), CAAM (Gran Canaria), Invaliden1 (Berlin), Fundación Chirivella Soriano (Valencia), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Antigua Iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús (Caravaca de la Cruz, Murcia), Gallery SE (Bergen, Norway), Goethe Institut, Instituto Cervantes (Stockholm), Fundación Canaria para el Desarrollo de la Pintura (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria), GE Galería (Monterrey, Mexico), among others. His work is present in the collections of the Fundación Botín (Santander), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), DKV, CAC (Málaga), Museo Sofía Ímber (Venezuela), Diputación de Jaén, ABC (Madrid), CGAC (Santiago de Compostela).

Sandra. Oil on canvas. 400 X 200 cm. 2018.

Ydáñez’s personal imaginary is informed by memories of his childhood, scenes of rural life and elements of the countryside it inhabits. Familiar, personal and everyday references which, over the years, the artist has connected with the History of Art and Humanity, while often concealing ethical and political messages. A painter of classical themes, his work is recognised for its expressiveness, which he achieves in quick work sessions where he captures the essential through broad, expressive and energetic brushstrokes and a limited palette of colours. Some of these features are found in Sandra, one of the pieces that Ydáñez created during his prolific residency at Ses12naus. A compulsive seeker of beauty in all that surrounds him, the artist interprets Sandra as a landscape that purposefully adopts monumental and vertical proportions, manifesting some of the changes in the paradigm of the contemporary image, namely, oversizing, the disappearance of traditional spatial axes, and the loss of the hegemony of the horizontal perspective.

A tree to weigh, a tree to measure. Multimedia, 3D animated GIF y neon lights. Variable Sizes. 2018.   

This piece was originally conceived and installed by the artist in a carob tree, a very common tree throughout the Mediterranean that takes its name from the Arabic word kharrūb. Carob pods have been used for different purposes throughout history: an aphrodisiac, a gem-measuring tool, or a source of basic nutrition. Precisely the word carat (unit of mass and purity of precious stones) comes from the Greek word keration which means carob. The carob tree, together with other native species such as the olive tree, the almond tree, or the fig tree, appear recurrently as powerful symbols of the Mediterranean. Karatasli uses the tree as a representation of primeval nature and, from that essential place, incorporates classical culture and the contemporary maelstrom through images and devices charged with meaning. In A tree to weigh, a tree to measure, the famous sculptures of The Slaves by Michelangelo Buonarroti are converted into an animated GIF and played on modern screens supported by one of those trees, which is also shown crossed by powerful bars of light white. This work builds an intense allegory of contemporaneity where all of us appear as those new slaves who maintain a complex relationship, more dialectical than symbiotic, with the environment that welcomes us and provides us.

Hotel Utopia. Video that includes a participatory action. 8’ 48’’. 2018.

Hotel Utopia is a project that starts from the ruined structure of a building that was going to be a hotel in Ibiza and was conceived by the renowned architect Josep Lluis Sert. The construction project began in 1969 and was stopped in the 1970s, being completely abandoned after Sert’s death in 1983. To date, the fate of the ruin remains uncertain. The video collects the ephemeral and participatory intervention that was carried out in that structure, paying homage to Sert’s architecture and, more generally, to the ideas, the utopian promises and the dreams of a modernity that becomes a metaphor for dissatisfaction and the unresolved contradictions it contains. The goal is not to give a negative view of the building, but to bring out parts of the structure through the act of painting, giving it an abstract and timeless feel, as if the building is suspended between its past and its future.

Sofia Eliza Bouratsis’s project draws inspiration from the conversations the Greek artist held with the other artists participating in the residency. They form the basis of a series of postcards displaying questions, in a perfect fusion of text and exposé of ideas in movement. 

Winner of the Basque Government's Gure Artea Award in 2013, in recognition of her artistic career and contribution to contemporary art. Alongside her visual work, Aláez has also engaged in activities such as space design and writing. Since 2000 (coinciding with her project Dance & Disco at Espacio 1 of the Reina Sofía Museum), she is also collaborating with other electronic music creators. She has extensive teaching experience through courses, lectures, and workshops. Ana Laura lives and works in Palma de Mallorca.