JUAN JOSÉ GIL. Pintura Pintura

This retrospective exhibition, organised by the CAAM in honour of the Canarian painter Juan José Gil (Vega de San Mateo, 1947–Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2023) takes its title from the first major series produced by the artist between 1977 and 1982, in which he explored the pictorial resources of American Abstract Expressionism and the theories of the French critic Marcelin Pleynet. With this title (Pintura Pintura), the artist sought to develop the idea that the content and subject of painting is the painting itself. This did not prevent him, in his subsequent development, from showing a keen interest in the issues of Canarian identity, its relationship with insularity, the sea and the landscape of the islands. His pictorial series from the 1980s, Paraislas, La casa, Fragmentos de la isla de San Borondón and Ciudadano del mar, bear witness to this concern.

The exhibition continues chronologically with the impressive Orilla series, painted by the artist in 1993, which expressed the idea of a certain shipwreck of the aesthetic and political ideals of Modernity. Yet, in the face of this notion of failure, he found solace in beauty. Thus emerge the series of paintings that represent a certain culmination of his career: the exquisite collection of landscapes entitled Estancias (1998–2000), purely figurative, and its continuation in the eminently abstract Polis series (2002–2004), which is crowned by a series significantly titled Elogio de la salida (2005). The exhibition concludes with a wistful reflection on painting, entitled Memorario (2009).