Juan Barjola

JUAN BARJOLA (Torre de Miguel Sesmero, Badajoz, 1919 - Madrid, 2004).
"Bullfighting: fall and catch".
Engraving, copy 49/99.
Signed and justified by hand.
Measurements: 73 x 105 cm; 87 x 118 cm (frame).

Barjola endows his Tauromaquias with an infamous sense, transmitting the tragedy of the art of bullfighting through a language inherited from Goya and Picasso, who already captured in their engravings their particular vision of this theme. According to Fernando Castro, an expert on the figure of Barjola, "The infamous visions of Barjola, gifted with an incredible capacity to capture existential nausea, have an obsessive rhythm, returning to inhospitable places, be it the bullring where the commotion occurs after the bullfight or the brothel where the bodies deliver, more than anything else, disgust". Barjola, who knew how to synchronize the currents of cubism and expressionism, develops in his bullfights the dislocation of the figures. Castro affirms "Barjola turns his tauromaquias into strange swirling compositions, paying enormous attention to the third of rods. In these catastrophic tauromaquias, the horse is almost always cast in the role of the propitiatory victim, swiftly dragged to death by an action to which it is oblivious, an action in which the horse is innocent. That is why there is always a supreme gesture of pain, of protest, of supplication".
Juan Barjola studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Badajoz and at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid. He made his individual debut in 1957, at the Abril Gallery in Madrid, and since then he has held individual exhibitions all over Spain. In 1960, with a grant from the Juan March Foundation, he travels to Paris and Belgium. Three years later the critics distinguished him with the Eugenio d'Ors Medal, and he exhibited at the Dirección General de Bellas Artes. He won the National Drawing Prize at the National Exhibition of 1968, and in 1985 he was awarded the National Plastic Arts Prize. In 2006, the IVAM of Valencia dedicated a retrospective exhibition to him. He is represented in the Museum that bears his name in Oviedo, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Fine Arts Museums of Bilbao and Asturias, the IVAM in Valencia, the Solidarity Museum in Chile, the Camón Aznar Museum in Zaragoza and the Contemporary Art Museums of Vilafamés, Seville, Alicante, Toledo and Cáceres, among many others.