My sancta sanctorum, a well-deserved exhibition tribute to the artistic universe of Juan José Gil at the headquarters of the Mapfre Foundation, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, while not being a comprehensive exhibition, a broad or generic vision, or a global retrospective of his work, it does, however, represent an intimate and calm look, exclusive to the keys of the ideas and pictorial material that interested the artist, establishing a set of precepts where the dynamics that his work weighs are based. Eventually, it is appreciated as the work that artists preserve for themselves as an idea of an impression in which to recognize themselves as alive.
Regarding the painter, having surpassed the logic and initial dependence on the milestones that marked the norm of contemporary art in Canarias; on one side, the immense density of Manolo Millares and on the other, the revered mastery of Pedro González; even turned away from the fashions and second influences of the moment, the pictorial currents that channeled his resolution from abstract expressionism to geometric abstraction, especially American, Juan José Gil’s work moved towards a consciousness of unity and a uniqueness of criteria that provided the generality of his project with a conceptual line and thought pattern that few current painters have managed to foresee in the Islands.
After some initial artistic frays, between 1972 and 1975, and a surprising initial staging, his exhibition sponsored under the title: “Painting-Painting” (1978), Conca Hall (La Laguna, Tenerife), Balos Gallery (Las Palmas), the artist redirected his gradient of meditation to delve into the position he occupies in society, about the place he lived and from which he will elaborate his artistic and discursive line.
Thus, his second pictorial body is resolved in the exhibition he titled Paraíslas (1984), (Leyendeker Gallery booth. ARCO, Madrid), where one can already glimpse and be warned of the language that will be common to him and will feed his fixation in the future: the Island/the Islands, form the reducing material through which the painter delves to return with his gaze; the colour establishes the delineation of light on the surface of the works and a dimension of planes in aerial depth will account for a new contemplation of the landscape, it will be the confirmation that it becomes inevitable to look at it from modernity. And yet, the series will remain embedded in the canon that values painting alone.
Two pieces from ‘My Sancta Sanctōrum’, by Juan José Gil. | | JUAN CARLOS CASTRO / javier cabrera
By that time, Juan José Gil had already become linked to groups and proposals that definitively marked a new contemplation and consideration of art in Canarias: on one hand, the Contacto group, led by the Gallardo brothers -Toni and José Luis- with a strong civil presence of marked political tone and awareness for the rehabilitation of a native cultural and intellectual proposal; it is worth remembering that Gil was one of the co-editors and signatories of the Manifiesto del Hierro (1976). And on the other hand, one of the artistic groups that largely shaped the conception of insular art in the last years of the 20th century: the so-called Generation 70, an invention born from the mind of the gallerist Gonzalo Díaz (Conca Gallery, La Laguna, Tenerife), with a wide impact throughout the archipelago and bringing together artists from practically all the islands.
By geographic nature, the painter was more closely linked to the group that operated in Gran Canaria and in which we can appreciate, we will say, two generational fragments; on one side, his contemporaries, like the cases of Cruz Prendes, Rafael Monagas, Juan Luis Alzola, José Román Mora, and somewhat later Paco Sánchez, and on the other, slightly younger, Fernando Álamo, Leopoldo Emperador, José A. García Álvarez and Juan Hernández, who moved between both islands. Likewise, Juan José Gil had already exhibited, either individually or collectively, in the most important galleries of the archipelago at that time, such as Vegueta, Balos, Yles and even Casa de Colón, in Las Palmas, and Conca Hall, Leyendeker, or Ateneo de La Laguna, in Tenerife. He participated in the ARCO Art Fair in successive years of 1983 and 1984; in tributes to relevant figures of contemporary art such as Picasso, Cuixart, Martín Chirino or Eduardo Westerdahl; besides being included in international collectives of intended significance or scope, although with little or dubious impact, both in Caracas, Venezuela, and in New York, United States of America.
In 1985, at the Radach Novaro Gallery (San Agustín, southern Gran Canaria), Juan José Gil presents a new series: The House, which would be a logical extension of the previous one, Paraíslas, in conceptual order, and an idea of deepening in the meditation of the territory: The House is the work of man’s hand and his intervention in the geographical scene but, at the same time, it is the abstraction of a human need for the habitable. The island has its reason to be if it is occupied by the milestone by which man recognises himself and, at the same time, shelters himself. As many houses as the imagination materialises, as many shapes and geometries as the human spirit can angle. And in it will fit all the reasons that man is able to assimilate: hope and deprivation, distance and belonging, light or darkness and vice versa, ultimately, humanity.The House as a Totem: a summary of all homes across the spatial course of time wherever they were erected.
Around that time, the late 70s and early 80s, the painter actively participated in various collective projects that emerged from the Islands and spanned the peninsula. “The role of the Canary Islands” and, moreover, “Southern Border” will be emblematic examples of this outward-looking vision of art made in the Canary Islands.
At the same time, he took part in specific island exhibitions with various peers of his generation: with Alzola, with Medina Mesa and Emperador, with Álamo, or even with Monagas, in several galleries and venues already mentioned, both in Gran Canaria and Tenerife. This was a very common characteristic at that time, the high participation and circulation of artists and their works throughout the archipelago, in which the painter is a committed author and constant player.
Towards the end of the eighties, Juan José Gil introduced a new series to the art scene, this time it was “Fragments of an Island: San Borondón” (1988), which was inaugurated at the Club Prensa Canaria (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) and then taken to the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Santa Cruz de Tenerife). This was a twist, almost over an abyss, of the proposals already developed by the artist. Obfuscated scraps, skewed cuts, impressed glimpses: a fragmentation of discourse for the exhausted memory, a reconstruction of snapshots about the overhauled utopia, a dense meditation on loss or forgetting. Here the island is equivalent to what a poem presents in the face of the improbability of establishing a reliable testimony to its nature. The transition from imagined emotion to perceived time.
After a sensitive detour, with proposals focusing on the traditional or considering popular ancestors and a playful look with a conclusion in the Suite La Rama (1990), Sala Antigafo (Agaete); the painter resumed the language that had made his career recognizable in the last five years: Citizen of the Sea (1991), presented at the Rayuela Gallery (Madrid), reaffirms a dramatization of belonging, a recognition of the locus and an ambition for the establishment and affirmation that the Island, the sea that contains and shapes it, the ambiguities that define it, a territory of necessary recurrence in memory, freeing in the painter the desire to transcend himself. And a black tape bordering the coast, which, like a cinematographic transit, a fixed image, perhaps synthesizes the continuous journey, now circular, inwards, both of the insular geographic imaginary and of the painter himself.
In Citizen of the Sea, the painter expresses a desire, and with “Ulysses” (1992), at the Club Prensa Canaria (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria), he reveals a soulful trajectory. After a short stay in Madrid, inland, the painter goes in search of self-recognition, and returning to himself means nothing other than the return, even through shipwreck, to insular consciousness: it is not a remnant or a journey of the Ulysses myth, which is also present, that Juan José Gil decides to recount.
Ulysses is the constant presence of a ship -calligraphy of a construct-, a wooded silence rowing on a tense dark surface without borders, under reddish skies blurred by passionate escapes. And it is not the painter who guides or tames the ship to a destination: here the painter is the object himself, already a ship towards the shore he is determined to return to, perhaps where he can repair his ideals, rest and contemplate, after an adventure fixed by drifting thoughts. Ulysses ends up being a graphic series, a recognition of what reality brings and is evident in a palpable meaning.
The new series, Shore (1992), presented at the Centro de Arte La Regenta (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) and itinerant through the islands between 1992 and 1995, is a conceptual excuse to settle into oneself, with all the risk that entails. Embracing some variant of New Figuration, within the parameters outlined by the Italian Transavanguardia and, of course, a certain tragic realism from the Spanish tradition, the painter reaches a level of concept that delves deeper into the passionate surface, at times murky and turbulent, of the canvases, always delving into uncertainty.
While being decidedly pictorial, it is also his most somber proposal, if not gloomy. Thick with material resolution and dense in conceptual intention, Shore may ultimately be the sensed coast where the Ulysses ship anchored or even ran aground towards a new consciousness. Here, the large format embraces the viewer by including them in its context.
Almost at the end of the decade, in 2004, a new event stands out in the painter’s career: his appointment as a Member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of the Canary Islands, for which he held the exhibition “Of Space, Time, and Light” (2004), at the Gabinete Literario (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) and the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Tenerife). It is a re-founding and summary of the pictorial processes, the constant conceptual themes, and the intellectual struggles that the painter went through in his many years linked to his personal conception of.#### Juan José Gil: A Renowned Painter from the Canary Islands
Juan José Gil’s artwork showcases the artist’s intentionality and the depth of his discourse.
From that point onwards, the painter has presented new exhibitions of his work that emphasise the canon that makes him recognisable in his painting. Notable solo exhibitions include “Doors, Praise of the Exit” (2005), “Canarian Mapfre Foundation-Guanarteme” in Las Palmas and La Laguna, Tenerife; “Almond Blossoms” (2008), La Caldereta Room in San Mateo, Gran Canaria; “Memorabilia” (2009), Canary Press Club in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria; and “Personal Work” (2010), Cabrera Pinto Institute in La Laguna, Tenerife. These exhibitions feature allusions to the territory, memory, and meanings embedded in the same plastic and compositional intentionality. Sometimes, perhaps, a dark and disappointed gaze, always profound, at what stubbornly was about to happen and never materialised.
On another note, Juan José Gil is already an essential painter for the various perspectives that can be formulated about Canarian art, whether from a historical, pictorial, or conceptual standpoint. This is evidenced by the constant presence of his work in all collective or monographic exhibitions held in recent years, both in Gran Canaria – at venues like La Regenta Art Centre, La Caja de Canarias Foundation (Cicca), the Art Gallery of the University Rectorate, or the Atlantic Centre for Modern Art (CAAM) – and in Tenerife – at places like Caja-Canarias Foundation, Círculo de Bellas Artes, or TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes. It is assumed that his work will soon be included in the Museum of Fine Arts in Gran Canaria (Mubea).
It is worth noting that a large number of theorists, curators, critics, journalists, and scholars from the Canary Islands have engaged with his work. Finally, it is worth mentioning that the painter and theorist Ramón Díaz Padilla, from the same generation, in his doctoral thesis “Generation of the 70s: analysis of the expressive forms of Canarian artists from the 1970s-1980s” (Complutense University of Madrid, 1992), points out that Juan José Gil’s work revolves around a meditation that delves into the ‘metaphor of emptiness’, accompanied by a successive and remarkable ‘Atlantic vision’. This vision touches on the principles that make us recognisable as a society and as humans from this geographical, historical, or mental latitude. Here, we come to a close.
