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CATALINA JULVE JAUME

Born in Mallorca, Balearic Islands, 1972
Lives and works in Manacor, Mallorca
Self-taught training

The most recurrent narratives in my work address possible strategies, stories and links related to man’s imprint on the territory. Historical facts and tradition help me build a story that proposes a reflection on the actions in the place we live. Ask questions from a look at the past to create a space for questioning and reflection with the tools allowed by disciplines such as painting and installation, large format drawing, video or engraving.

I have participated in national and international individual and collective exhibitions and fairs.

My work is found in collections and public entities such as Es Baluard Museum of Contemporary Art, the Consell de Mallorca, the Sant Llorenç des Cardassar City Council, the Binissalem City Council, the Semanario de Felanitx and in multiple private private collections.

I work and live in Manacor, Mallorca, Balearic Islands.

Solo exhibitions

2022/23

O CANTO DES CIGARRES , Drawing Room Lisboa,  Foco Ilhas Baleares,Institut Estudis Baleàrics, Portugal

XALET, Auditori Sa Màniga, Cala Millor, Mallorca

Una Parcel·la Obscura, policromia d’una rebel·lió, Centre de Cultura Sa Nostra, Palma de Mallorca

2019

Hippies Always Welcome, Museu d’Història, Manacor

2018

Fast Wood, Fundació Estel de Llevant, Manacor

2013

Recent works, Galeria Can Dinsky, Son Servera

2011

Recent works, Sala SACMA, Manacor

2010

Davall la pols, Espai d’art Miquela Nicolau, Felanitx

2009

Individual, Sala SACMA, Manacor

2008

Collages, Galeria Marimón, Can Picafort

2006

Las Cabras, Galeria Camí del Mar, Manacor

2004

Obra recent, Galeria Camí del Mar, Manacor

2002

Noves Presències, Consell de Mallorca, Galeria Quassàrs, Manacor

Group exhibitions

2023

TASTART23, Hi havia una vegada, Museu de Porreres, Porreres, Mallorca

Finalistes Certamen Arts Plàstiques Ciutat de Manacor, Museu d’Història de Manacor, Manacor

ALART 2023 Observatori, Casal Son Tugores, Alaró, Mallorca

DIDOL, Capella Fonda , Son Servera, Mallorca

2022

Col·lecció  d’Art Contemporani Ajuntament de Sant LLorenç, Sa Màniga, Cala Millor

ArtNit22, Campos

2021

Deu Visions Actuals, Sa Màniga, Cala Millor

Finalists Certamen Pintura Marratxí, Centre Cultural Sa Cabaneta

2019

Arnit19, Campos

2017

Nit de l’Art, Esglèsia Nova, Son Servera

2016

1er Saló d’Art Independent, Manacor

2014

Fundació Trobada, Manacor

2013

Finalits Premi Ciutat de Manacor, Museu d’Història, Manacor

2010

Nit de l’Art Palma, Espai d’Art Miquela Nicolau, Palma de Mallorca

2007

Finalits Premi Ciutat de Manacor d’Arts Plàstiques, Museu d’Història, Manacor

2005

Sis Propostes, Sala d’Art s’Estació, Manacor

2000

Finalists Premi Ciutat de Manacor d’Arts Plàstiques, Museu d’Història, Manacor

Art fairs

Drawing Room Lisboa,  Institut d’estudis baleàrics, Foco Ilhas Baleares, Lisboa

Art Expo BCN, Galeria Quassàrs, Barcelona

Gent Fair, Galeria Quassàrs, Belgium

Feria de Santander, Galeria Quassàrs, Santander

Awards

2023

New Drawing Talent Award, Drawing Room  Lisboa & Viarco, Portugal

Primer Premi Pintura Son Carrió 2023

2022

Premi Certamen Arts visuals Vila de Binissalem

2021

Menció d’Honor Certamen Pintura Son Carrió

Segon Premi Certamen Arts Plàstiques de Felanitx

2000

Segon Premi Certamen Pintura de Son Carrió

Wounded painting

A text for the exhibition Una parcel·la obscura 2022

 by Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta

The translation of this text has received a grant from the Ramon Llull Institute

Art prevents the oblivion of everything that must be remembered, those matters that we have to keep in mind in order to move forward on our path with intelligence and sense. Art is memory and premonition, but it is also real knowledge, a questioning exercise of research, contradiction and synthesis that allows us to know where we come from, where we are and where we are going. It is a practice that manifests our mistakes and questions our acts, that directs our gaze towards experience with the will to get closer to understanding. It is for this reason that the artist must be positioned in the gap, where conflict or lack of communication occurs, where concepts collide or become blurred, in these dark areas of our history, of our thinking, where the natural flow of events and ideas is broken—transitional spaces in which, before continuing, it is necessary to understand.

In a strange contradiction, Una parcel·la obscura by Catalina Julve serves as an illumination for one of these critical points, one of those areas of reflection that the artist turns, in the midst of the drift of history and the current whirl, into a clearing in the forest, into a space for this memory that prevents oblivion, into a place to auscultate ourselves, and to question ourselves. For a long time Julve has been searching, through the archives of the Spanish Civil War and post-war period, for these photographs that reflect the confrontation of the people, the misery and the drama, the violence, the sadness and the hunger—selected images that are later revisited through a panting that starts from the document to position itself permanently in the artistic. It has to do with works that manage to relocate in space, time and ethics this initial photographic testimony that is, almost always, manipulated, biased and filtered by the political power of each period.

Julve says that photography has been linked to her creative processes from the beginning, that the testimonial and evocative capacity of this type of images serves as a germ to reinterpret what interests her from a more plastic and aesthetic dynamic. This is precisely what she does in this project: she starts form a visual ecosystem that works as a first document, as a pretext, as a detonator, to bring to light the underlying concepts behind this preliminary structure, updating the look and renewing the framing on a subject that belongs to the collective memory, but that has a perception that has been changing, deforming, forgetting and burying itself under the uncontainable deluge of time. It is a dark period that has been overshadowed in a self-serving way by ideologies, by indolence and excessive ambition.

Julve avoids making a direct judgment so that the evidence of the images contemplates the conflict. The creator fixes her gaze on the past with the aim of improving the future, making the half-lighted areas visible and defending the transforming function of art. It is a task of vital importance that she decides to carry out through painting, engraving, drawing, sculpture, and even video and installation, but always taking as a starting point this photography that has been losing its value as a testimony, as a document, as an expression of veracity. All this is happening at the same speed as the volume of uncertain information it contains has increased, its massive (re)production has grown and its obscene manipulation has been facilitated thanks to the (frenetic and alienating) revolution of a technological media that pretends to know everything and to be able to handle everything. It is possible that we now find more reality and commitment in Julve’s painting (in her engraving, drawing, sculpture) than in other more indiscriminate ways of producing images.

The works that shape this project, precisely because of this reality and this commitment, have not been accomplished in just any space, but have been conceived and executed in an old rural school called Son Negre, built in 1927 in the region of Manacor (Mallorca), the place where our artist was also born. In this shut down and emblematic building, without chairs or school desks but with the strong symbolic significance of having been the focus in some way of those years of war and post-war, is where this intimate act of creating takes place. It is a connoted place, not at all neutral, that charges with memory everything it contains, everything it relates to, everything that happens—a space that connects with recurring topics in Julve’s work such as childhood, women, care, but also misery, hunger and cold, with everything that the war made us lose along the way.

In the paintings, Julve appeals to color in a singular way, as if each painting were a monochromatic strip of a spectrum of light that the artist has decomposed and reordered on the basis of a reduced palette that takes into account formal and compositional resources assimilated from black and white photography. They are independent works (although linked) that the artist resolves in oil painting through a figurative and expressive painting of unfinished, intuitive, gestural and intense appearance. Just as a preamble to this unfolding of contained and organized colors, a deep black appears, which Julve includes thanks to an engraving and a drawing that she understands in a conceptual way—a black that exudes the darkest part of the project and that manages to incline our attention to the chromatic display on honeycomb cardboard, unframed and lacquered, which we will find next. The space ends up assuming its form thanks to the document, to the frontality of a hurtful and monochrome video with brutal images of the battle and an installation that stirs us from austerity, forcefulness and simplicity.

It is a proposal that aims to help new generations to face this historical memory that, despite its significant importance in the construction of the future, is not always treated with the respect it deserves. It is a visual research that speaks of horror and loss, of oblivion, of fear and silence through the representation of its main characters, of spaces and facts, of beings that indicate with their posture the burden and the suffering they bear, the pain they resist—bodies that express their suffering regardless of ideologies, Una parcel·la obscura, a wounded painting, that fights against collective amnesia.

The memory of the youth against the ordinary man

A text for the exhibition Una parcel·la obscura

by Antoni Riera Vives

The translation of this text has received a grant from the Ramon Llull Institute

On August 16, 1936, in the midsummer heat, still in the early morning, 4,000 republican militia disembarked in Porto Cristo, with Captain Alberto Bayo leading the movement. Twenty days after disembarking, and without the support of the Republican government in Madrid, Bayo gave the order to withdraw. Even so, some troops, dozens, maybe more than a hundred, who were scattered throughout the countryside, did not receive the order to reembark and in a few hours were located by Franco’s soldiers, who executed them in Manacor those days.

In the meantime, hundreds of republicans from Manacor had been imprisoned during those same days at the beginning of the war. Outside the law, the local falangists took charge of emptying the prisons and perpetrating genocide. Those murdered in Son Coletes, Manacor’s cemetery, numbered in hundreds.

This summer marked eighty-six years since all that happened, time enough for those who lived through it to be now four or even five generations away from today’s young teenagers. Porto Cristo is a coastal location. Mallorca’s coast has been subdued to a strong tourism pressure and an important migratory avalanche, first from the Iberian Peninsula, and then from the rest of the world. Today, the memory of everything that happened on the beach, in the streets and in the countryside, right were the students of Porto Cristo’s high school live, has faded away.

Marina Fuster, a teacher in the Social Sciences Department at Porto Cristo’s high school, tells us that “the syllabus for the 4th year in Compulsory Secondary Education covers the main historical events of the Contemporary Period, that is from the end of the 18th century to the 20th century. During the first days of the academic year, we always assign one or two sessions with the students to talk about what they know and what we will learn through the school year. Every year, without much surprise, the characters that sound most familiar to them and generate the most fascination are, usually in this order, Hitler, Franco and Mussolini, that is the leaders of totalitarian regimes. No trace of the Bolshevik revolution or the Second Spanish Republic.”

Without any perceived ideological bias to explain the interest in these three characters, their regimes and their consequences, it still awakes interest among teenager students. We could call it the ‘fascination of evil’, an almost unexplainable amazement at the capacity for evil that human beings can have. Also, of course, the morbid curiosity for the deaths and for the methods of mass and systematic extermination help to generate this dangerous cocktail.

According to Marina Fuster, “probably the series, the movies… have a lot to do with this knowledge, since Nazism or Francoism are the context of books and comics that they may have read years before. At the end of the third trimester, we do a historical memory project in which they have to interview a family member or acquaintance and try to find out what the historical context of the early years of Franco’s regime was like.”

Once the primary testimonies of these episodes have disappeared, it is now increasingly difficult for the students of Porto Cristo to reach secondary testimonies, many of whom are over eighty years old, if they are still alive at the time of carrying out this research project.

In order to be able to effectively value the historical awareness of the students of Porto Cristo, a town so directly affected by the disasters of the war, we formulated a survey among the students of the 1st year of baccalaureate with questions about the concepts of ‘memory’, ‘war’, and also general knowledge of the war that devastated the Spanish state between 1936 and 1939.

From the thirty-eight surveyed students, only three of them associated the noun ‘memory’ with the adjective ‘historical’ when they heard it. When they heard ‘war’, nine of them associated it with ‘[Spanish] civil’, five did it with ‘world’ and another five did it with ‘cold’.

On the other hand, when they had to link the noun ‘war’ with a toponym, twenty-one students, more than a half, thought of Ukraine and Russia. Six have thought of Germany and another five have thought of Palestine, Israel or the Middle East conflict. Only two of them have associated the word ‘war’ with Spain or Catalonia. And only one has written ‘Manacor’.

Undoubtedly, the juiciest part of the survey, the one which refers to the episodes which took place in Porto Cristo in the summer of 1936, highlights this document’s thesis: the years are tinged with forgetfulness and oblivion. Only thirteen students link Porto Cristo to a disembarking during the Spanish Civil War, and only twelve can speak about the mass murders committed in Manacor during the conflict. These numbers coincide, to a small or large extent, with the recognition of family oral transmissions. “Do not let them take you away from the old ones,” said Biel Majoral some thirty years ago to a group of young people who were following him at a concert. Family oral transmission, in our immediate environment, confers cohesion, awareness and a sense of group belonging to young people, who can thus lay the foundations to be able to critically and rigorously achieve the knowledge and skills that they will acquire at school.

There are eleven students who believe that for political reasons or because of the current situation, a conflict like the one in 1936 could happen again. The rest do not see it as possible. Only one of them links the possibility of a civil war with the organization and resurgence of the Spanish far-right parties like Vox.

For Jesús Camargo, philosophy teacher at Porto Cristo’s high school, “historical awareness is decisive, because if we do not have it, we cannot act accordingly in front of parties like Vox, which speak with complete banality of Francoism or fascism, or people like the Italian prime minister, who talks about Benito Mussolini’s goodness, reach the government.”

Camargo recalls Hannah Arendt talking about fragility: “She said that any human matter is fragile, and we are not aware of the fragility of all the good things we experience, which are so hard to build and so easy to destroy. And not only among young people, but also people from our generation: there is a very dangerous knowledge gap.”

Ortega y Gasset, “who was very right-wing,” Camargo continues, “said that the ordinary man is emptied of his own history, and enjoys the fruits of a millenary tree, but belittles and ignores his roots and the effort it has taken to conquer these rights.”

Camargo also reminds that teachers “must not let the students become ordinary men, as if they were all cut from the same cloth of indifference, and we must fight, therefore, so that they become aware of our roots.”

The students of Porto Cristo’s high school have gone to the cemeteries, 2015 in Porreres (Mallorca) and 2021 in Son Coletes (Manacor, Mallorca), to follow the excavations of the Graves Plan of the Balearic government. They have always done it so impressed, with interest and respect, with curiosity and responsibility, and this provides an irrefutable proof that the formative task in schools and high schools is decisive to ensure the consolidation of a critical and free-thinking spirit among young people and future generations. Exhibitions such as the one presented here and now by Catalina Julve are, therefore, also a necessary link in the configuration of a healthy society that is self-focused and self-aware of its potential and its weaknesses, and the presence of school-age young people is definitive in achieving these objectives.

HIPPIES ALWAYS WELCOME

A text for the exhibition Hippies Always Welcome 2018

 by Antoni Riera Vives and Catalina Julve

The translation of this text has received a grant from the Ramon Llull Institute

I am fascinated by free people. Without ties, without prejudices, without conditions that go beyond a natural and sincere relationship with one’s own body, with land, and with congeners. Deep down, we all want to be free, and we walk through life seeking this freedom, this innate ability to roam free. This is what brought me closer to hippies, what made me understand the motto “Hippies always welcome”. They have always existed: those who distance themselves from the system, the misunderstood, those who have never understood power or the ambition for material goods, the Pythagoreans, those who in Greek times postulated primitivism, the Franciscans and their vow of natural poverty, the Cathars, the minstrels, the troubadours, the myth of the good savage proclaiming the intrinsic goodness of the uninstructed person, the naturists… All of them, in their own way and in their own time, had been hippies. I wanted to capture them on canvas, on paper, to shape them, to interpret this way of understanding life—still something distanced me from them. Rationally, they were mine, all those hippies and their images, but what about emotionally? I swam deep inside myself and clashed with those closest to me. We all have people close to us who grow differently—even ourselves, more than one day, more than one season. Sometimes they are surly, taciturn people; other times, loving and willing people, but they are always different: freed from absurd obstacles, with a magical connection to the environment, living beings within an ecosystem of living beings, distant souls from the urban tumult, from the cold of the streets, from convention and regulation. If you look at the peculiar light in the eyes of children, you will understand this freedom which so few know how to make persist.

So yes, these have been my hippies: those who are always welcome, those who contain peace because they are peace. Those who love without thinking why. Those who laugh because they are free. They are my hippies. Look at them, and in them you will see yours.

Catalina Julve Jaume – All rights reserved

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