The Victoria de los Ángeles Foundation and the Sant Pau Art Nouveau Site present Javier Pérez’s artistic installation Plecs del temps.
Barcelona, 29 September 2026
- The opening, on 30 September at 8:00 pm, will feature an inaugural performance by dancer Moreno Bernardi and mezzo-soprano Helena Ressurreição, with the collaboration of Lo Spazio.
- The installation brings together the works Nightmares and Night Currents at the Sant Rafael Pavilion.
Barcelona, 29 September 2026. – The Victoria de los Ángeles Foundation and the Sant Pau Art Nouveau Site present Plecs del temps, an artistic intervention by visual artist Javier Pérez (Bilbao, 1968), which forms part of the 2026–27 LIFE Victoria season and coincides with the commemoration of the 625th anniversary of the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau.
The exhibition, which will officially open on Wednesday 30 September at 8:00 pm at the Sant Rafael Pavilion of the Sant Pau Art Nouveau Site, proposes a profound dialogue between presence and absence, repose and restlessness.
Plecs del temps brings together two key works by the artist: Nightmares (2018), comprising seven Carrara marble cushions arranged on the beds of the former ward, and Night Currents (2018), a series of six photographs intervened with inks and pigments that capture the disorder of a restless night against the mineral solidity of the marble. The space thus becomes a territory of memory where the body continues to manifest itself through its traces.
Inaugural Performance and Opening to the Public
The opening event, on Wednesday 30 September, will be crowned by a performance created and performed especially for the occasion by dancer Moreno Bernardi and mezzo-soprano Helena Ressurreição, centred around Federico García Lorca’s Nana **and featuring the collaboration of Lo Spazio. Through dance, singing, movement and breathing, the action will give body and sound to the memory of those who inhabited the space, in a search for respite and repose.
At the end of the performance, a glass of cava courtesy of Juvé & Camps will be served.
The exhibition will open to the general public from 1 October 2026. On the same day, also at the Sant Pau Art Nouveau Site, Sala Domènech i Montaner, the LIFE Victoria season will officially open —with Javier Pérez as its artist-in-residence and creator of the edition’s visual identity— with a star-studded recital by mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard and pianist Malcolm Martineau.
About Javier Pérez
After studying Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (ENSBA), where he lived between 1992 and 1997, Javier Pérez burst onto the international art scene with his first solo exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris in 1996 and, a year later, with his first museum exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg.
His works are characterised by a certain syncretism, both in their methods and in the materials used. Sculpture, photography, drawing, video and performance are used both independently and in combination to create installations in which interaction and exploration are essential.
Through his work, Javier Pérez reveals his concerns and reflections on the human being, using a language rich in intense metaphor and imbued with strong symbolism. His works contain an intrinsic dialectic, revealing how fragile the boundary can be between seemingly opposing concepts such as the natural and the cultural, inside and outside, or life and death.
