"Univers Jordi Cano", curated by Glòria Picazo at the ACVIC

The ACVIC The Vic Center for Contemporary Arts has inaugurated the Univers Cano Universe exhibition, which can be visited until 23 April. The exhibition includes some of his paintings and reveals his cultural and artistic references that were as diverse as music, dance, film, visual arts, literature and folk tales, among others: Miles Davis, Pina Bausch, Francis Ford Coppola, Joseph Beuys, Lewis Carrol, Little Red Riding Hood, are permeated in the author's work.

The curator Glòria Picazo has structured the exhibition following different areas: cultural references; a journey through three artist books he made in collaboration with various writers; a field dedicated to characters from children's literature; and the educational side of the artist, which is shown at the School of Art of Vic, which explains a pedagogical methodology developed by Cano, and therefore, the space becomes an open classroom where to experiment with this creative method.

In the first of these areas, an intellectual portrait of Cano is constructed based on his cultural references. These include William Shakespeare's play; Pina Bausch when it comes to dance; Orson Welles, Luchino Visconti, Peter Greneway and Wim Wenders in relation to classical cinema - Cano's extensive video library is shown in the context of the exhibition; James Joyce, Thomas Bernhard, Michel Tournier or Peter Handke on literature; Andy Wharhol, Jeff Koons, Shophie Calle, Peter Fischly and David Weiss in the visual arts; and writers and poets with whom he befriended and shared projects.

The next three areas of the exhibition are based on three artist editions. The first is 1 + 1 = 1 (Adding) , a four-handed work he did with Picazo herself and which is the result of a game of correspondence, exchange of quotes and images gathered based on of shared readings, of seen films, with very diverse literary references. This edition also featured creators such as Víctor Sunyol, José Carlos Cataño, Annie Bats, and Matthew Tree, who were part of the edition of The Butcher's Logic.

The second edition is The Archivist of Coda , made with the writer Annie Bats and several collaborators; and the third Llegit, therefore lived , thought of as a diary and in which the art critic and curator Miquel Bardagil recounts his encounters with the artist during the months of September and October 2002.

The fifth area is thematic and is dedicated to a recurring question throughout his artistic career: references to characters in children's literature such as Aladdin, Alice, Little Red Riding Hood, Peter Pan, or Peter and the Wolf, and which arise in paintings, drawings and editions. As Picazo says, "this is a way of approaching children's myths from an adult's point of view, but as a child it is dazzled by magical and inspiring unreal worlds."

The last area of the project is in the exhibition space of the Vic School of Art and presents Cano's teaching activity, carried out for two decades, basically at the Elisava School in Barcelona. "And that is the logical consequence of his previous work, developed at Eumogràfic, Eumo Editorial and most recently at Eumo_dc, as well as his long collaboration with the University of Vic", according to the curator of the project. Here the students are in charge of paying tribute to him with projects carried out following his teachings and having as a premise “the value of the transversal as a creative method: thinking with the head, thinking with the feet, thinking with the hands and to think with the eyes, as Jordi Cano always claimed ”. This space will grow and will be fed with the contributions of the students during the course of the three months of exhibition.