It is now 30 years – who would have thought it – since Juan Giralt (Madrid, 1940) first exhibited at the legendary Galería Vandrés, and only a few less since at the same venue he showed his early drawings and collages, whose aesthetic is not far removed from that of his present work. But come what may, this painter keeps on painting. Certainly enduring in art is important, but when it comes to painting, renewing oneself when one has a long track record gives heroism a certain melancholy touch. The strategy used by Giralt to outlive himself is in any event what is most plausible: making painting an experience, an ascesis, a discipline – the only way of halting the ravages of time.
Giralt’s aesthetic model for accessing this science, as we can now confirm, was Matisse – its best exemplar in 20th-century painting; his current particular form of expression has to do with his personal history and his refinement, which is considerable, as well as the synthetic spirit with which the best painters of today disaggregate a picture and reassemble it from a thousand disparate elements that ended up getting into it. This makes sense, for if painting deserves to last, there must be room in it for everything – techniques, styles, gestures and allusions. Giralt’s generation, emerging in the sixties and seventies, had a good training for this, but what in my view is marvellous about this painter is how he has persevered with this mixture without ceasing to savour it, transmitting an increasing sense of pleasure. Our whole history is perhaps no longer any more than a collage, but how impressive it is for this to be conveyed in spatial terms and for it to appear to us as beautiful.
Extract from the review of the exhibition at Galería Antonio Machón. El País, 31 March 2001,