By his last exhibitions, Juan Giralt (Madrid, 1940-2007) was a celebrated painter among art-lovers and in possession of what we might call a fine-tuned and well-balanced creative system, accomplished and moreover non-transferable. He had left many things behind, such as Après CoBrA expressionism or the seventies neo-figurativism centred on the Vandrés gallery. But all that was now surfacing in a new life with the transfer to painting of the possibilities of collage and the emergence of a homogenous oeuvre of finely offset decontextualised fragments.
But this painter had paid a high price for the peculiar distinction of this style, to use a term that he would have deprecated, especially as his style’s virtue lay in being an antistyle: assembling disparate imagery discarded from other uses on one canvas – magazine cuttings, pictorial gestures, words, postcards, ornaments or structures that appear in windows like tiles without any one predominating over the others. This was well described by his son Marcos Giralt Torrente, curator of this exhibition at Galería Cayón in Madrid, when he spoke in his fine book Tiempos de vida of painting which ‘by multiplying centres, did away with the very notion of centre’.
But we were talking of a price. A divorce in the personal sphere, a break with the gallery that sold his work and a distancing from the new figurativism under which other painters, such as Alexanco and Gordillo, had managed to get on. All this meant that when he returned from New York in the early eighties, he was forgotten. Averse to all labels, enriched by travel and now able to arouse the subtlest emotions in painting, Giralt’s personal and creative history was out of step with an art history already written. This, in an art scene marked by the urge to capture institutions so as to establish legitimising narratives for present and future, is not forgiven. It is paid for.
But on second thoughts, the reverse is also paid for – when an artist fits neatly into a particular chapter of the narrative, as in a stamp album. But this was not so with Giralt: in 2015, eight years after his death, a retrospective of his art was held in the Reina Sofía Museum. I remember him as diffident, discreet and droll, roaming about second-hand sales and assorted shops where he sensed he might find something surprising or beautiful, lost property which might shine again. His last few years were those of his triumph as a painter, outside the discourses of history. Paradoxically, this is what now puts his painting in a class of its own.
‘Juan Giralt. La pintura entre extremos’ (Painting between extremes). Galería Cayón. Madrid. Up to 29 January 2021.