To get a better understanding of who Juan Antonio Guirado was and why his paintings are more than art they are visionary works of an artist considered a genius by many leading art critics and intellectuals. His paintings tap into man's subconscious and question the world we have created and its future.
This week I will publish chapters from the essay by Laura Revueta who is one of the leading authorities on Juan Antonio Guirado having worked closely with the Guirado Estate from 2015-2018. Laura Revuelta ( Art critic and editor-in-chief of ABC Culture magazine) who has led educational panel discussions, co-curated two exhibitions of Guirado 'Environmentalism' Madrid 2017 and 'Parallel Universes' Jaén 2018 as well as has written essays for her magazine ABC Culture, on Guirado for exhibitions in Spain at Fundacion PONS, and the University of Jaén that was covered in magazines including Vanity Fair, Arte, and L'officiel Arte ES, AD Magazine ES amongst others. You can watch her lectures and talk about Guirado on the video educational pages here EDUCATION
others.
By Laura Revuelta
Art Critic, Curator and Editor-in-Chief of ABC Cultural
Translated by Martha Bátiz and Damian Tarnopolsky
Juan Antonio Guirado left Spain and remains at the margins of Spanish art of the last decades of the 20th Century. This is a rough, two-line summary of the life of a man who returns like a prodigal son. Margins are for forgetting; that makes them a particularly suggestive space for memory and rediscovery. From the margins, memory has rescued artists and writers whose position no one questions today. More details can be glimpsed and discerned in the margins than within the frame. It takes a lot of work, however. The path must be weeded further. Ideas must be linked and light shed where perhaps just a few shadows could be seen. We must not let ourselves be carried away either by appearances or by what is merely apparent. What is invisible goes unnoticed. Juan Antonio Guirado is not—and must not be—invisible to Spanish art. As a philosopher would say, we are here to rescue him from being wrapped in himself, trapped in his circumstances. We have come here to recreate him, to draw parallels that might place him in context and show that his affinities are both meaningful and vast.
In embarking on “rescuing” or “reshaping” marginal artists—perhaps marginalized by biography or fate—we should ask ourselves if the figure who is to be redeemed by an exhaustive analysis of his work would like to come back to life. To rise from the ashes and walk through one of his exhibits again, to face the critics once more, the audience, his own implacable judgment. If I had the chance to ask his opinion, what would Juan Antonio Guirado say to me? Hello and goodbye? Thanks for coming? Would he ask me to leave him alone? Maybe. It seems that in life, despite the success he achieved both in Spain and abroad (evident in the plentiful foreign news clippings detailing his numerous exhibits and critical achievements), he preferred discretion and even keeping a certain distance from worldly noise—he found refuge in the humility of art in lower-case-letters. His art rests on spirituality, as we shall ascertain. He combines a genuinely Spanish tradition with what he will capture and make his own in faraway lands that are suffused by other philosophies and sensibilities, such as Buddhist, Zen, and Brahmanic. Why, then, invite him back onto the stage of the living with their empty compliments, of bright lights and awards? Who are we to decide? On what basis can we steal the work of an artist from oblivion simply because, according to our own judgment
, it is remarkable for some reason? I’m afraid, if I may joke a bit about it, that Juan Antonio Guirado would have had to burn his entire work to prevent what is about to happen from, in the end, happening. But he didn’t. His legacy is here and so are his heirs. The same correlation between creators and descendants is repeated once more—a sequence that is not any less suggestive merely because it is repeated many times: the latter feel obliged to bring the artist out of the margins. To shine a light—as much as possible and necessarily—on his trajectory. In this case, it is a completely legitimate, indeed indispensable effort.
Juan Antonio Guirado left Spain on a journey of initiation, like so many artists who make their way beyond Spain’s borders—which, for many decades were so restrictive (some would say suffocating). This does not only refer to politics. He left his possessions behind in order to find new and seductive paths to explore. In the end, they all converged, past and future, back at square one. As Guirado put it in an interview many years later, speaking in the unadorned language that matched his simple manners: “While I was in Spain, my works were traditional; I had to come to Australia to discover a new style. The influence Australia has on my entire work is very strong.” It is very hard to let go of the past; it always comes back to pay us a visit. It is not just painters who become creative exiles, of course. There have been plenty of writers in identical circumstances who have chosen to make their escape—from novelists to poets, to intellectuals from every position on the ideological and cultural spectrum. My wild guess is that in Juan Antonio Guirado all of these roles are blended together: poet, thinker, and author. And all of it emerges in his paintings. Just as Tàpies writes in his book Art Against Aesthetic, in a phrase Guirado underlines in red—part of an attentive reading that will return at various points in this essay: “Because an artist (we will never tire of repeating) will always seek affirmation over negation. Artists would sooner find the motives and ideals to take us along new paths towards the future than dwell in the critique on the analysis of the past,”1 or “The mission of artists and poets is to provoke reflection, to awaken, to call to attention, to show and enlighten reality, and, in sum, to exalt all that makes us freer and more human.”2 Juan Antonio Guirado committed himself to all of this.
But before this aside, I want to bring forward the names of other painters who also traveled, who left in search of answers or refuge and brought back a potent legacy that has been well cared for by their heirs. Esteban Vicente, for example, with his raw-boned abstract expressionism crafted in New York: a Museum and a Foundation in Segovia managed his work after his death. José Guerrero, whose work challenged the great North American proponents of abstraction and who returned to Granada to his own museum and Foundation, thanks to the guardians of his art—protectors who have not ceased to reclaim, defend, reshape, and revise it in [spite of the hindrance of local leadership and politicians]. Now it is Juan Antonio Guirado’s turn. He embarks upon an inner journey in order to reclaim art as a theoretical and practical battlefield: the battlefield of life and death. Many of his paintings present us with a fierce struggle between form and substance. But there is an intermediary in this battle—Guirado.
I have always thought that an artist’s greatest fortune is if his heirs—be they blood-related or chosen by himself as guarantors of his memory—are well-matched with the creator and his context. Famous artists have been badly promoted and badly taken care of by their successors. Others, less famous for many reasons, have made up for lost time thanks to a good promoter of their talent. No one should believe, however, that being chosen to receive an artistic legacy is a prize or a blessing from heaven. It can become the greatest responsibility to fall on one’s shoulders. A sweet life sentence to be served by devoting oneself to another’s life and work. We are here thanks to the Guirado Estate, which has set out to find a place for an artist who in his creative freedom traced a very intense path, committed to his art as the absolute response to a time plagued by doubt and by apocalyptic conflict.
Initiatory journey, from Jaén to Australia
Juan Antonio Guirado was born in a small town in the province of Jaén in 1932. His childhood was marked by the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath in one of the poorest regions of the country. This fact must be emphasized because it will fester in his art like a wound no matter how he tried to salve it with the balsam of East Asian philosophies that offer calm through meditation. He was raised in Jaén, he studied painting in these cities and Madrid, and traveled to Italy and Paris to do what all artistic apprentices do: try/match/confront his skills and imagination with the classics. Up to that moment, there is nothing unusual in the life of a young man who yearned to become a real painter. His true initiation began, however, in 1959. Juan Antonio Guirado traveled to Australia—to the literal antipode of all he had seen until then. And he stayed there for a very long time. He returned to Spain many times, and lived for a while in Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands, where landscapes are also evocative of the seismic origins of Nature. Islands, volcanoes, open spaces as infinite as the horizon. Guirado traveled halfway around the world to develop a career that had started with success, but at the beginning, in Australia, he had to combine painting with other jobs. At the end of his days, he returned to Spain, to Almería, to wrap himself in the peace of humble people—small-town people. To paint like a street artist in the company of other artists who were as unpretentious as he was.
Many years before Juan Antonio Guirado began his journey, Gauguin, in the midst of a completely different yet no less evocative landscape (Tahiti), urged on by the same restlessness, wrote in his journal, Noa Noa: “Nature gives us symbols: the sense we make out of it, the sensation, the feeling, the idea that we have of it. We do not possess it except indirectly. Our reality is made from those fictions. But the substratum, the pretext for those fictions is inexhaustible, Eucharistic: we can all commune with its infinite richness. Nature is always significant, different for all, full for each of us.”3 After a few years, Juan Antonio Guirado would dedicate a painting to Gauguin and another one to Tahiti. Eucharistic is the word—the key that opens one door and then another and so on in one communion after the other with his surroundings.
Guirado himself explains: “In Australia, there is a sort of spirituality, many soulful things having to do with the Earth, with the people.” Another quotation, from the British writer and painter Julian Bell’s book What is Painting, underlines this point: “The world, in the eyes of philosophers and scientists from Plato onward, was made firstly in terms of form, secondly of colour. Forms, ideas, or principles were the basis of everything, and colour was a ‘secondary quality,’ icing on the cake. Paintings proceeded correspondingly. Lines were drawn, defining the forms, and then coloring was added.”4 We have already entered Juan Antonio Guirado’s cosmological universe. It features two axes he put together after traveling halfway around the world physically, intellectually and emotionally: Nature in its broadest sense and art in its most radical incarnation. However there is one more clue missing, for we are building the blessed Trinity of his work: human beings and their conflicts, which he experiences directly, far removed from the insensitivity of the contemporary world and the dignitaries of a chaotic world who have more elevated responsibilities. There is a vindicatory spirit in Guirado’s trajectory that cannot be eluded. In this sense, he is no different from many other Spanish artists of his time.
TO BE CONTINUED..
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