In filumis Juan Giralt's first solo exhibition in Palma (he had previously taken part in several group exhibitions, the first of which was held in 1973 at Galeria Pelaires in a tribute to Miró).

Our Cabinet exhibition is —needless to say— just an introduction to Giralt's body of work. For the sake of consistency, we have selected nine pieces from a very specific period: the early 1990s, the beginning of the apex of his artistic mastery, when he overcame the dichotomies between abstraction and figuration and between analysis and gesture that so much influenced earlier periods of his career, and when he opted for a half-blood work.

The exhibition hall features three large acrylics on canvas in which stereotypical landscapes and other recognisable features emerge from an eminently abstract composition, whereas the office displays four pieces on canvas and cardboard in which the artist applied the collage technique to his painting practice.

Painting on wire, developed at sight, synthesising and conciliating extremes, intellectual and cold, but at the same time highly emotional.

Madrid, March 2024

The notebook.

By Juan Giralt

I aspire to make my work reflect what I think about painting.

I leave my pictures in the studio for a long time, and subject them to occasional checks, changes and corrections. I like painting to be done thoroughly. Pictures painted on canvas in a direct process seem to retain the life and energy accumulated over the sessions of work on them: they have their own history, they lie and hide things, and on occasion they give you a glimpse of what they were, or show you something very obvious at first glance, yet their raison d'être lies in the elegance with which they conceal a mundane prior development.

I dislike "tidied up" pictures.

I often use small collages when painting. With them I seek to insert an element at odds with the picture's formal structure. Sometimes I include old portraits from antiques fairs, drawn by the opportunity to give them a new life in another space, introducing, along the way, a sentimental contamination alien to myself.

To work, in front of the canvas I try to be in a receptive state, and so, staining and structuring it, I await the visitation of a "third arm" liable to surprise me. It is desirable for these visitations to be often, as there is nothing worse than habits acquired from one's work, techniques and processes.

In order for a picture to be worth the trouble it needs to get out of your control.

Painters inhabit woods so tangled that we tend to shut ourselves into confined spaces, armed with our own rules. But we must ensure such codes do not turn into dogmas. No exclusive position is worth defending. Painting must violate any theoretical approach. Permeable to every kind of contamination, it is enriched by contradiction and doubt.

Paintings generally improve by elimination. But as "less is more" often borders on "less is less risk", I seek a balance between a very primary order and other murkier and more emotional aspects. The result is an order sustained by a deceptive geometry of crooked lines.

I am put off by the literary trimmings with which painting is saddled. My titles come to me after the event and correspond to associations of ideas or result from the use of some obvious or subconscious element.

Time dilutes, erases or subverts the intentions and limitations with which paintings were created. Wherever it is hung, stripped of all conditioning, painting suffices unto itself, complicit with eyes that know how to look at it.

I loathe the words abstract and figurative, especially as applied to my work, and I loathe the determination of those who wish to explain the history of painting as a sequence of conquests culminating in the dizzying isthmuses of the 20th century.

In the treacly pelagic zone where my time stands still there floats a blend of Guston and Uccello, Mondrian and Velazquez, Utamaro prints and anonymous Fayum portraits. We – painters – loiter in the environs.

June 2003

Galeria Pelaires has received a grant from the Consell de Mallorca to realize this exhibition.