In recollection and praise of Juan Giralt
I met Juan Giralt in the early seventies in Madrid. He was one of the foremost artists at the ultramodern Galería Vandrés, run by Fernando Vijande together with Marisa Torrente, and I was starting my career at Grupo Quince, a multiuse venue – engraving workshop, publishing house and gallery – near Galería Vandrés. Thanks to this proximity and to our shared interests and friendships, we in the Grupo Quince team often attended the opening nights and performances of the Vandrés artists and they would do likewise at ours. The dictator was soon to die; it was a time of elation, seething with hope, in which nearly all of us involved in that cultural effervescence shared one aim: the wish that the art scene of Madrid and by extension Spain, despite the restrictions imposed by the dictatorship, should not differ from that of other European capitals. Anyone who sees photos of that time and looks back at its exhibitions and the aesthetic debates we had will grant that this aim was achieved.
Despite his youth, by then Giralt already had quite a track record. He had set out in informalism, figured in post-CoBrA expressionism and since the mid-sixties practised a figurativism which in its early manifestations took Bacon as a model and was then radicalised under the influence of pop. His development in this first stage was recorded in his early exhibitions in Amsterdam, Sao Paulo or Madrid as well as at international biennales and fairs, so that by 1972, aged 32, when he unveiled the first of his three solo shows at Galería Vandrés, he was not just an experienced artist but also had what is hardest to achieve: a recognisable style and personality. A dazzling use of colour and a taste for meta-pictorial interplay were part of his make-up, but so too was an intimate dichotomy that would define his career. As José Antonio Moreno Galván, one of the chief critics of the time, said in his review of Giralt’s striking exhibition of 1974, there were two apparently contradictory sides to him, ‘on one hand, a certain formal geometricism in structures; on the other, an antiformal and expressive spontaneity, at times close to humour and caricature.’ Where Moreno Galván’s commentary erred was in viewing this show, entitled Papeles, recortables y collages (a resounding success with painters) as the definitive triumph of Giralt’s expressionist, gestural character, to the detriment of his cooler, more analytic side. Time would show that this dichotomy would never be left behind and that his apparent changeability had a covert purpose.
The eighties came over in Spain like a storm: new players entered the scene, others vanished and some, like Giralt, held their ground and turned the turmoil into an opportunity to experiment and to break with practices that could morph perilously into straitjackets. I had an intense experience in those years as head of the Culture Ministry’s Exhibitions Directorate, curating exhibitions of work never before seen in Spain or laying the ground for such necessary projects as the Reina Sofía Art Centre (1986), later to become a National Museum (1988). I saw Giralt only occasionally. A few times in New York with our mutual friend Daniela Tilkin, or with Juan Muñoz. Moreover, he did not exhibit much and I gradually lost sight of him. I occasionally saw some of his work at the Arco fair, but never enough to get a clear sense of how it was evolving.
I did not really get to see him again until the nineties, through his shows at the Bárcena & Cía, Afinsa-Almirante and Metta galleries. His painting, which had kept the colourful eclecticism of the seventies and a liking for interplay with painted words and collage, had reached a peak of maturity. The old dichotomies had been resolved, as perhaps had been the plan from the start, and Giralt’s various personas had converged in one dazzling oeuvre – emotional, ironical, uninhibited, cultured and with an unequivocal plasticity – unlike that of anyone else.
When Juan Giralt died in January 2007, after three marvellous exhibitions in a row at Galería Machón that consolidated him as one of the key figures in the generation of painters marking the Spanish turn of the century, I was left wondering sadly if his immense stature as an artist would outlive the injustice of fashions, the reviewers of the day and the inertial synergies that often govern the art market. A conversation about this with Manuel Borja-Villel gave rise to the Juan Giralt retrospective that we both curated at the Reina Sofía Museum in the 2015-2016 season. I am truly glad to have thereby helped the work of Juan Giralt to gain (as it seems) ever more admirers.