JAVIER CALLEJA: CURIOUSLY

ALMINE RECH Turenne is pleased to announce CURIOUSLY, Javier Calleja's sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.

May 30 - July 25, 2026

“I’m not a revolutionary artist, I’m an evolutionary artist,” Javier Calleja says, without hesitation.

He’s right: if contemporary art was born and came of age amid the cradle of a revolutionary aesthetic — always defining itself against the dominant aesthetic — it is possible that in the twenty-first century things have shifted somewhat, or that they, too, have simply evolved.

His work does not carry the charge of aesthetic, stylistic, or structural revolution. What it offers instead is the excitement of perpetual evolution within the framework he has defined and the system he has built. That system summons a cast of characters whose ancestors live in comics — he mentions Francisco Ibáñez Talavera (1936–2023) in particular — and in the history of painting, Yoshitomo Nara among others: small figures, often shown face-on, looking the viewer straight in the eye. Setting is not really at stake: a flat color, a cloud; the figure presents itself like an object, like a thing whose composition invites appropriation. The simplicity of the arrangement gives pride of place to text, which appears on the characters’ T-shirts, in clouds or comic-strip speech bubbles: “The path of the truth is made of realities,” reads one figure in a drawing on paper presented in the exhibition, a speech bubble hovering above him. He appears to be perched on the snow-covered peak of a small mountain.

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— Éric Troncy, art critic, curator, and co-director of Consortium Museum in Dijon, France