We present an exhibition of the latest works by Juan Alcalde in our gallery. It’s a selection of 25 paintings he has done during the last 3 years.
Alcalde is not only the most veteran of our artists, he has been a close friend since the 60s, when Francesc Draper, founder of the gallery, met him in his Parisian exile trough another member of the Spanish School of Paris, Joaquín Peinado.
At 79, Alcalde is still in creative plenitude. He draws on the themes he as always liked, the scenes he has lived, images he thinks he has seen or he has imagined: lonely streets, personages in incented spaces, pottery standing in the middle of an unreal landscape…Always with his strong personality that gives his painting a disturbing touch that likens him to the metaphysical and the expressionists.
Over the years, his work has become barer, more naked looking for the soul of things. This is evident in his characters, who deprived of anecdote and scenery, present to us just them, with no disguise, with an emaciated expressiveness that is common to all his work.
His landscapes are sober, simple, of a rigorous lineal schematism, with a delicate, subtle chromatism that convert the works in metaphysical. His volumetric cities, usually desert, show the loneliness of chunky buildings, the quietness of petrified streets and squares, the anxious silence of an asleep city that hides inside the essence of a history amassed by time.
Juan Alcalde has always faced his craft with devotion. For him art is “an expression where the soul and the intellect gather together and try to emulate nature. Art is translating life; life is in a few lines by Matisse. But, art is today linked to politics and banking, two dangerous things”.
The exhibition of the latest works by Juan Alcalde will be open until June 14th.
