PINTURAS

Juan Giralt or the form of desire

Much has been written—and well written—about Juan Giralt. However, as I am now leafing through catalogues and texts on the artist, a short text written by him has particularly caught my attention. It is one of the few statements I know by Juan Giralt himself; more than that, it is a kind of self-portrait as a creator that begins with a declaration of principles: painting and his affirmation as a painter. At this very point, the concerns of our artist are summarised.

But to say painter or painting says very little, because everyone knows that the word painting, dense in meanings and interpretations, is deeper than the sea and holds a multitude of readings. Moreover, the artist himself once told me, as we were looking at a painting: “painting cannot be defined.” We were both observing a spill of pigment up close, in that area where painting dissolves into an endless series of transparencies and nuances. Indeed, that could not be described in words.

So what is behind this declaration of principles and this affirmation as a painter? What did the artist want to tell us? Were these empty words? Knowing Juan Giralt’s work, I sense why he speaks of an attachment to painting and why painting is indefinable. In very broad terms, Juan Giralt’s work is the expression of desire; it is painting made desire. Naturally, when speaking of Giralt, one refers to an art of construction or structure, and also to a skilful synthesis of opposing values, an organisation of fragments, as well as inventive metaphors in which paintings are compared to textiles, mosaics or landscapes. All this is true and well explained. But I wonder what lies behind this structure, behind this synthesis in Giralt’s work. Without a doubt, there is something more.

Juan Giralt’s art is an art of seduction, an art that seeks an ideal formal state. For this reason I have referred to desire, because Giralt constructs painting as a kind of utopia or Arcadia. An expression of an idea of balance or synthesis of opposites, his work is like a space stolen from dream or eternity, an ideal space. This, it seems to me, is the way of looking at his painting—or rather, the way I understand his work. In fact, much of the history of painting—though not all of it—seeks this other space, a beyond that is profoundly sensual and moving: painting as desire.

Giralt seeks this ideal form, but this search requires a very arduous and complex process of trials and corrections, of advances and retreats. In Giralt’s working method there is something heroic: each painting is a battle. He probably begins his works spontaneously; an anecdote, a stain, a colour are enough to start a canvas. Then he gradually builds a geometric structure using elements that form the basis of his personal language: colour planes, improvised strokes, collages, stencilling, etc. Simple elements subjected to an infinity of variables and combinations. In this way, painting becomes exhausting in its complexity, as the artist must experiment and observe how these elements interact. In painting there are no absolute values or fixed rules; the painter must verify and control, through his eye and craft, effects that are by nature unpredictable when they appear on the canvas. Painting is something profoundly alive, dynamic and unrepeatable. A colour, for example, is something changeable and unstable; Matisse already said that the size of a surface modifies the value of colour, that one square centimetre is not the same as one square metre of the same red; but textures, juxtapositions, placement within the format, among many other factors, also transform and alter it. Thus Giralt tests, eliminates, adds, probes, until he finds the ideal form, that miracle—or desire—to which I referred earlier. I imagine this process as a capture, a hunt, or if you will, a discovery witnessed by Giralt in the first person. It is his eye that detects and captures the final image. It is worth noting that Giralt’s painting process, between spontaneity and calculation, is an open one, a journey whose outcome is unknown at the start. The artist keeps a photographic archive recording the process, the stages of this search. Each work is photographed several times as it evolves or is corrected. This archive is a tool for reflection; it also helps to understand his working method: each work is a process and a different story. But to me it signifies the artist’s effort—or could one say suffering?—towards that ideal form, towards that desire that Giralt constructs.

Giralt belongs to a tradition of modern painting, painting as construction or structure. But what is important is the sensitivity with which he approaches this tradition, what is personal and original in it. It has already been said that he seeks a kind of balance or ideal through the synthesis of opposites: collage/painting, transparency/opacity, stroke/plane, order/dissonance, written word/painting, surface/depth, etc. This is true, but this opposition of contraries has a much broader dimension. I suspect that in Giralt there is, on the one hand, something deeply emotional, and on the other, a register governed by logic, reflection and judgement. His invention and art are expressed in this dialogue of opposites, which is above all a question of attitude and artistic personality, already perceptible in his earliest stages. Anyone who looks at the catalogue of his 1974 exhibition at the legendary Vandrés Gallery will notice a continuity with his current work. This is not the place for an artistic biography or for assessing that exhibition, which marked the overcoming of Informalism in his trajectory. What matters is that, under the title Papeles, recortables, collages, Giralt presented works described as a carnival of colour and sensuality; but at the same time there is in them an idea of control and calculation, especially evident in the use of graph paper and in the positive-negative compositions that structure the image. Today the painter uses a different language, but in his trajectory it is possible to identify the same internal logic, a thread that helps explain his personality as a fusion of apparently irreconcilable traits: the emotional and the rational. Giralt’s painting has always expressed itself as a solution, a happy point of contradiction. Hence the delicacy and great complexity of his work, because Giralt mixes elements like medicines that, if administered in the wrong dose, become a deadly poison. In short, when we speak of hybridity or synthesis in Giralt, we are saying that he constructs a world of dissonances, of disparate and seemingly illogical elements, which the artist nevertheless manages to endow with form and pictorial meaning. It is not a game, but a way of being a painter.

Jaume Vidal Oliveras