Splendor Lucis Aeternae by Juanjo Martínez Cánovas
My grandfather died in 1984. I was 4 years old. I didn’t remember anything about him except the stories my family told. On 7 October 2019 his body had to be exhumed to be moved next to my grandmother’s body. Two months later I created an exposition in which I show memories of his story through his objects, my drawings and his handwritings.
The exhumation of his grandfather’s body gave Martínez Cánovas a sense that results in this project called Splendor Lucis Aeternae, which closes his doctoral thesis based on enduring in time, death and eternity, and which is called “Identity, stamp and revision of the concept of death in figurative artistic creation in the Region of Murcia (2000–2019)”. Splendor Lucis Aeternae was shown at the Centro Cultural Puertas de Castilla Murcia in 2020.
A small white book that represents everything that the artist discovers about his grandfather when he was exhumed , inside another absolutely black book that shows the darkness of being buried.
For the typography we have used Editor Condensed in regular and bold, and Minion for the long texts inside. Strictly speaking, the font that was used is Adobe Devanagari. The book exclusively uses the Latin part of this Indic script typeface, which is equivalent to Minion.
