Anthropologist Alexander Alland (1977) defined art as an integrated set of game, form, aesthetics and transformation. Essentially, he concentrated his attention on the elements of transformation-representation that emerge with aesthetics achieved (Harris, 581, 1981). In this sense, Guinovart's work is truffled by elements that belong to this way of understanding art as a primitive manifestation of primordial impulse.

The artist himself expressed in an interview on the occasion of the Guinovart exhibition. Works from 1948 to 2002 that art and human being are the same thing in communion with the spiritual space and physical space: art is man, and here is a great doubt, a great question (...). With all his passion, Mondrian stated that art would not be necessary when human beings entered rationality, abandoning nature (...). Art is man, it is not possible to understand the spiritual space without the physical space. The components of human life are represented from materiality, thought and suspicion.

This view of homo sapiens as an artistic and animal animal of the search is present with a plastic and numinous authenticity, from an imaginative flow that allows to go from everyday to abstraction and from here to unique creation and the mystical space. This idea is very present in works such as The Eye of the Wheat, Constellation of Ash and Heads, Love and Ash, among others that make up the sample. The game of ambiguity, of contradiction, the creation of thought from the initiatory zero raises each work to an almost sacred or liturgical dimension. In the work selection we find three central themes: daily and spiritual as a source of knowledge, appeal to the deities and the creative universe and construction - constant deconstruction of human beings.

The title of this proposal is inspired by the famous article by Barnett Newman. The first man was an artist (originally published as The first man was an artist, in The tiger's eye, No. 1, 1947), where this idea is pronounced of recovery of the initial poetic gesture that pushed the human being to look beyond the present until the end of the universe and the stars to find himself; This first gesture, without a doubt, was that of an artist. Guinovart retrieves it in each creation, each artistic motive is a desire to recover this first human gesture, break it and re-think human nature, which leads us to the approach of the principle: the first human being was artist

Harris, M. (2009). Introduction to Anthropology. Madrid, Spain: Alliance
Editorial.

Maria Cleofé Campuzano
Curator exhibition