"Barcelona: Found in Translation", or how the Barcelona experience influenced the work of 7 jewellery artists. The collection takes Barcelona as a topic, not as a geographic location, but as a reference, as an opportunity to express the dichotomy between local and global, traditional and contemporary, individual and collective...

The relevance of jewellery (Barcelona, 2011)
Àlex Mitrani

When contemplating the technical and formal sophistication, tangible beauty and conceptual subtlety of these pieces, as small as they are dense in values, nobody can avoid considering the question of luxury. Nevertheless, it is not to be interpreted here as a term associated with the frivolity of futile worldly distinction but rather as an expression of that which is related to excess and excellence, as a yearning for perfection; we are being asked a question about its function in a specific context, the here and now, as doubts and reconsiderations pervade every strata of society.
Jewellery, small and portable art, individual yet communicative and never individualist, discreet and serious. It is probably a much more demanding art for the user than other traditional art forms (from painting to video art) that involve a contemplative distance that becomes protective. As such, understood in the context of the searching and critically exacting approach observed in the Barcelona school, it is an appropriate art not only for these oft-mentioned liquid times but also for the times ahead, which promise to be turbulent. Subtlety, privacy and exigency make for a sense of enjoyment that is in no way unimportant. With the complicity of the wearer, the pieces become exemplary and, potentially, stimulating for change and transformation.
In Klimt02's selection of Barcelona works, irony and rigour, simplicity and complexity, come together and cross paths, inviting contrasting readings of the pieces. The combative and committed kitsch of Kepa Karmona or the refined beauty of the opacities and transparencies of Gemma Draper, the artisan and technological synthesis of the Emiliana studio or the unsuspectingly black spatial graphic art of Ramon Puig, the paradoxically utilitarian formalism of Marta Boan or the enigmatic mechanics of Estela Saez, the poetics of the object and the economy of movement of Marc Monzó, offer starting points for considering the extent to which the process is as important as the final piece.
I would say that these jewels are precious; in other words, they are important. In fact, the solutions adopted by these authors, while very different from each other, hav
e one thing in common: they avoid ostentation of any kind. They fulfil the conditions of the best art, the most legitimate: they are meaningful and are the result of freedom and reflection. It is a relevant art.