With the main title and with each of his works, the artist Juan Henríquez guides us to look at two determinations of creation: solitude and enjoyment. Within the artistic game that brings together creator and spectator, enjoyment introduces the ancient Greek term of aesthesis as a pleasant connector dynamism that gathers the process of emission and reception of the work.

I can translate Greek aesthesis to what contemporary French semiologist Roland Barthes calls “punctum” associating it with a touch that comes to the reader through the signifiers since it is a fragment of the work that leaves its space towards the viewer to touch or hurt their sensitivity.

This time I am not the one who is going to look for him (…), it is him who comes out of the scene like an arrow and comes to punish me. The punctum (…) is that chance in which it touches me (but that also hurts me, punctures me).
(BARTHES, Roland, 1990, The Lucid Camera, p 64-65).

When I speak of the game I mean the elaboration of the significant form that implies all poetic and artistic action in working with the materiality of languages: lines, colors, the energy of the stroke. In this imaginary zone of the pictorial materiality that touches the creator and the spectator, we can highlight a point of union or enjoyment, not obvious, in the works of Juan Henríquez that interweaves between the body, images and signs that we will call “Punctum” of pictorial anagrams – as a game of significant fusion of diverse languages – which can mislead at the beginning, before the reader understands the rules of the game by the author who consciously or unconsciously, establishes connections between the body of enjoyment and visual forms and Literals involving bridges between the linguistic imaginary of letters and pictorial images.

Every joyous act contains its shadow and as you can see by the use of black color (contrasting with celestial, blue, gray, white, red), in the agitations of pictorial gesture to tell us something of that juncture of purity and impurity, sublimation and perversion, which can accommodate the aesthetic space of enjoyment. In those everyday subjects where the artist does not abandon the aesthetic symbolization or forget the more obscure or hidden acts of corporeity, the reader has to release his imagination until he can feel the joy of this diversity of materials, pictorial techniques and that body path of erotic figuration.

A simple illustration of what unites the pictorial signifier of figuration to the desired object and to a desiring body can be seen in The Table whose abstraction leads it to seek meaning in a hybrid figure: drawing a green angle with thick strokes (Table of enjoyment?) and an oval and white shape with a thick point similar to a nipple (oral libido projected to an object?) Green linear corner maybe the signifier A simple illustration of what unites the pictorial signifier of figuration to verde warns us of something cornered of the not evident sense that must  to see in the linguistic signifier that names color, since it occurs in the forbidden view of enjoyment that that white oval that ends at a point is the term of a breast desired

Victor Fuenmayor

International Association of Art Critic Member
June 2016

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