Juan Barjola

JUAN BARJOLA (Torre de Miguel Sesmero, Badajoz, 1919 - Madrid, 2004).
"What happened", 1964.
Oil on canvas.
Work reproduced in the catalog raisonné of the artist.
Presents damages in the frame.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 130 x 164 cm; 150 x 176 cm (frame).
Belonging to the current of the representative expressionism, Juan Barjola is one of the most outstanding Spanish painters of the second half of the 20th century. Already as a child his fondness for drawing is manifested. At the age of fifteen he arrived in Badajoz to begin his training at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios of the city. In 1943 he moved to Madrid, where he first studied at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios and later at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. At the same time, he furthered his education at the Prado Museum. During this period, which ended in 1950, Barjola made a series of academic works of naturalistic style, with themes taken from family life, suburban characters and other genre scenes. Around 1950 he began a new stage of post-cubist style, a prevailing trend in Madrid due to the influence of Daniel Vázquez Díaz. During these years Barjola would develop faceted images, with flat treatment and bluish and cold colors. At the same time he began to develop a new, more constructive stage, marked by earthy colors. In 1957 Barjola made his debut at the Abril Gallery in Madrid, and that same year he held two more personal exhibitions in Brussels. He then began a brilliant exhibition career that would take his work to Europe, Japan, the United States and Latin America. Around 1958 he began a short but intense period in which he experimented with a language of abstract tendency. His work will now be marked by thick and sumptuous impastos of sordid and dark colorations, which form abstract and organic still lifes. It is the moment of apogee of the material abstraction led by Tàpies from Barcelona. A year later, and without disappearing the thick impastos, the organic stains begin to be resolved in human embryos, the result being a return to figuration in line with the international trend initiated by Francis Bacon. Barjola thus became the main Spanish representative of the New Figuration. At the same time, his work became more and more recognized. Towards 1964 his work underwent a new evolution, marked by the paintings of Velázquez, Goya and El Greco. Thus began the Golden Age of the painter. The thick impasto disappears and his language becomes more fluid, while his colors acquire brightness and luminosity. At the same time, Barjola created a series of works of brutal expressionism and great visual power, linked to the themes of violence and war. However, by 1972 his painting began to leave behind this conceptual weight to open up to a more purely plastic experimentation, in which form, composition and color became the protagonists. This change leads, in the eighties, to a painting marked by a decorative sense and a lighter lyricism and optimism. All the drama of his work disappears, and the paintings become celebrations of light, color and movement. It was at this time that he was awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (1985). However, in the following decade Barjola would return to dramatic expression, leaving aside formal experimentation to focus on an implacable pessimism, directing his painting towards what had always been his artistic credo: the expression of human drama. After his death in 2004, important exhibitions have been dedicated to him, such as the retrospective held at the IVAM in Valencia in 2006. He is currently 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 Museum in Vilafamés, etc.