Juan Barjola

JUAN BARJOLA (Torre de Miguel Sesmero, Badajoz, 1919 - Madrid, 2004).
"Bullfighting", c. 1985-1990.
Oil on canvas.
Attached certificate issued by the "Legado Juan Barjola" and signed by D. José Antonio Galea".
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 100 x 81 cm: 130 x 110 cm (frame).
This painting, belonging to the Tauromaquia series of the artist Juan Barjola, represents a portrait of a picador, one of the fundamental characters of the bullfighting ritual. Through an expressionist language charged with drama, Barjola deliberately deforms the anatomical proportions of the character, intensifying the violence and tension that surround the world of bullfighting. The face, with its angular and grotesquely distorted features, shows an exacerbated gesture that seems to condense the suffering, rudeness and brutality implicit in the exercise of his profession. The wide-brimmed hat and the golden suit, treated with broad gestural brushstrokes, reinforce the iconicity of the character without losing the critical dimension that runs through the entire series.
The theme of bullfighting played a central role in Barjola's career, especially from the 1960s onwards, when he developed a deep interest in exploring bullfighting not from an epic or romantic perspective, but as a vehicle for reflection on violence, human suffering and the existential condition.
In this portrait of the picador, Barjola reaffirms his interest in the human archetypes present in the bullfighting festival, understood as symbols of a brutal theatricality that reveals the duality between the heroic and the tragic. The plastic deformation, far from being a mere stylistic resource, acquires here a deeply symbolic character, expressing the physical and psychological wear of the individual in the face of the immediacy of danger and death.
Belonging to the current of representative expressionism, Juan Barjola is one of the most outstanding Spanish painters of the second half of the twentieth century. Already as a child he showed his love for drawing, which led his parents to guide him on the path of art. At the age of fifteen Barjola arrives in Badajoz to begin his training, and enters the School of Arts and Crafts of the city. Fully committed to his incipient career, in 1943 he moved to Madrid, where he first studied at the School of Arts and Crafts on La Palma Street and, later, at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts. At the same time, he furthered his training at the Prado Museum, where he copied Velázquez and interpreted Goya, Brueghel, El Greco and Bosch. During this period, which ended in 1950, Barjola produced a series of academic works of a 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 at that time due to the influence that Daniel Vázquez Díaz exerted on a whole generation. 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 solo debut at the Abril gallery in Madrid, and that same year he held two more personal exhibitions in Brussels, at the Theatre and Vallvora galleries. 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 in which the pictorial matter assumed the leading role in the painting. 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 current initiated by Francis Bacon. Barjola thus became the main Spanish representative of the New Figuration. In 1960 he received a grant from the Juan March Foundation which allowed him to travel to Paris and Belgium, and in 1963 he was awarded the Eugenio D'Ors Medal by the critics. That same year he exhibited at the Dirección General de Bellas Artes, and shortly afterwards he was awarded the National Drawing Prize at the National Exhibition (1968). Towards 1964 his work undergoes a new evolution, marked by the paintings of Velázquez, Goya and El Greco. Thus began the Golden Age of the painter, with paintings transformed by the appearance of the human figure, three-dimensional space, natural light and the open air. 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.