Francisco Peinado

FRANCISCO PEINADO (Málaga, 1941).
"Entrance of desire", 1978.
Mixed media on canvas.
Presents on the back label of the Rayuela Gallery (Madrid).
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 138 x 178 cm; 154 x 192 cm (frame).
Entrada del deseo by Francisco Peinado, is a work fully representative of the plastic universe that the artist has developed throughout his career: a personal language, dense and symbolic, in which the organic, the mechanical and the psychological converge. The composition is articulated as a closed and fragmented space, almost scenographic, where the figures do not inhabit a natural environment but a mental environment. In the center emerges a hybrid being, with deformed and animalized features, whose anatomy seems in constant mutation. This figure, partially trapped in a structure reminiscent of a cage or frame, is key to understanding Peinado's iconography: the body as a territory of conflict, transformation and desire. In his work the presence of ambiguous figures is recurrent, halfway between the human, the animal and the objectual, as well as isolated anatomical elements, visual prostheses and structures that evoke impossible mechanisms or architectures. All this configures an imaginary where desire is not presented as a harmonic impulse, but as a contained energy, often disturbing, that deforms and reconstructs the body.

Painter and engraver, Francisco Peinado spent his youth in Brazil, where he emigrated with his family in 1952. He studied at the Superior School of Fine Arts in São Paulo, and in 1963 he returned to Spain and settled in his native Malaga. In 1966 he lived in Cologne for six months and held an exhibition in Frankfurt. In 1972 he moved to Madrid, and seven years later he returned to Malaga, where he currently lives. He made his individual debut in 1964 at the Biosca Gallery in Madrid, where he repeated his presence two years later. Since then he has exhibited individually in Spain, Germany, France and Finland, highlighting his personal exhibitions held at the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid (1970), the Diputación Provincial de Málaga (1975, 1987, 1994), the Rayuela gallery in Madrid (1978, 1981, 1984, 2001), the Bellechose in Paris (1979), the Signius in Lübeck (Germany, 1990) and the Juan Gris in Madrid (1990), among many others. He has also taken part in numerous group exhibitions in Europe and the United States, and in 1992 he received the Andalusia Prize for Plastic Arts. Francisco Peinado is currently represented at the MoMA in New York, the Museum of Abstract Art in Cuenca, the Reina Sofia National Museum, the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Library in Madrid, the Ateneum Taidemuseum in Helsinki, the Museum of Modern Art in Rijeka (Yugoslavia), the National Gallery of Slovakia, the Museums of Modern Art in Bilbao and Seville, the Rodriguez Acosta Foundation in Granada, the Museum of Fine Arts in Malaga, the Salvador Allende Itinerant Museum and the Palace of San Telmo in Seville.