HARENES, COMIDAS Y PAISAJES
Carlos Franco (Madrid, 1951) is considered one of the most distinctive artists of his generation, which in the 1970s strongly and convincingly advocated for a return to painting with all its consequences. Over time, Carlos Franco distanced himself from that initial group of artists and has always managed to maintain an approach that is as personal as it is fresh and full of vitality.
One of the keys to his practice is the combination of elements from pictorial and cultural tradition (mythological subjects, formal approaches close to some late 19th-century painters…), with a drive towards innovation and experimentation, as well as the exploration of new resources and materials. Among other works, Carlos Franco is the author of the façade paintings of the Casa de la Panadería in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor.
In the 1970s in Madrid, a group of artists—Juan Antonio Aguirre, Carlos Alcolea, Rafael Pérez Mínguez, Guillermo Pérez Villalta and Carlos Franco—formed what became known as the “Madrid New Figuration” group. Beyond the recovery of uses and techniques of traditional painting that had been somewhat forgotten, if not openly dismissed, they shared a certain narrative impulse, often drawing on figures and forms from a mythical or magical past, and in general, a gaze on art history shaped by a rejection of avant-garde orthodoxy.
In the 1980s, however, Carlos Franco would demonstrate that his was a solitary journey. His concerns soon proved to be less formal and more conceptual, and it quickly became clear that his connection to Symbolist sensibilities lay not only in a preference for certain themes or mystical pasts. In his painting there is also a vindication of the decorative, of the formal beauty of the elements that make up painting itself; this led him to use embroidered fabrics, tiles, shells, sequins…, and later fluorescent paints. A painting capable of telling wonderful stories in an equally wonderful and magical language.
His work places us in a shared and luminous past where things can be expressed in a more complex way. His paintings speak to us about life and our own lives, through dreams and through what cannot easily be rationalised; where our desires, fears, and what remains of our innocence are best housed. He does not seek, like the Symbolists with whom he shares so much, a new spirituality that would make this soulless world more habitable. Instead, he simply opens a path for us to encounter ourselves, in a world beyond conventions. A world capable of returning our dreams and teaching us the essence of things and landscapes, of stories and of our own lives.
Pablo Jiménez
