Juan Barjola

JUAN BARJOLA (Torre de Miguel Sesmero, Badajoz, 1919 - Madrid, 2004).
Untitled, c. 1985-1987.
Oil on tablex.
Attached certificate of authenticity Sucesión Juan Barjola signed by José Antonio Galea Fernández, son of the artist.
Presents small damage in the frame.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 27 x 35 cm; 46 x 54 cm (frame).
This work is one of the multiple interpretations that the artist from Extremadura made around the theme of bullfighting, a recurring motif in his plastic production and of great symbolic and expressive weight in his career. In this painting, we can observe a bullfighting scene full of dynamism, tension and drama, in which bullfighters, bull and horse intertwine in a chaotic, almost choreographic movement. The composition, with a clear expressionist influence, is characterized by a vehement stroke, intense colors and a deliberate anatomical distortion that underlines the latent violence of the scene. The bull, the central axis of the work, appears with a monumentality that contrasts with the human figures, giving it an almost mythical symbolic force. The angular forms, the fragmented planes and the arbitrary use of color refer to a language close to cubism and fauvism, but with a very personal emotional charge.
Juan Barjola is one of the most outstanding Spanish painters of the second half of the 20th century. Already as a child he showed his fondness 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 trend initiated by Francis Bacon. Barjola thus became the main Spanish representative of the New Figuration.