... now to what interests and concerns us, Juan Giralt! I think it is fair to note that, along with Luis Gordillo, he was the first and undisputed master of the ‘Madrid Figuration’, with his peculiar dialectic way of apprehending painting: thesis, gesture, construction, synthesis, reflection, combining and reconciling of opposites, etc. The common denominator in the artists who emerged from that school was, simplifying greatly, colour. Colour, for those engaged in that dialogue, was precisely the decoding and distinguishing factor relative to the achromatic El Paso group.
Juan Giralt’s unusual use of colour undoubtedly places him in the vanguard of the finest chromatic sensibility in all Spanish art of the latter 20th century. He could compare only with Tapies in colourful vein, Mompó or perhaps Rafols Casamada. Juan Giralt’s colour schemes, whose dense meticulousness make them quite impossible to imitate, call to my mind the best Bacon, with their moist lushness and thick strokes. When I think of Giralt I think in violet and green, orange and blue – I always have. To use colour is certainly not to accumulate quantities of diverse pigments. Living inside and outside colour, combining its inimitable innate spontaneity with the utmost self-censure and anarchic freedom is solely characteristic of Giralt. He really is a true painter, with all that that entails in rejecting the futile virtuosity, formulas or aestheticisms we know well.
Juan does not so much draw with colour as make colour spread out with a life of its own. Every gesture is informed by what went before, and we could say in his regard what Max Ernst once said: “the hand does not forget what the eye has contrived”.
Even this far on in my solitary progress, and with quiet obstinacy, I am still concerned and amazed at how current history (or the critical appraisal of each creator) involves odd inaccuracies. Historically this has always been so. Fortunately more clear-sighted ‘revisionist’ schools have rectified many critical slips, though we know there are no absolute truths but rather just approximations. In the elucidation of art each period has its own way of reading it.
Regarding Juan Giralt, why is he not studied in the place that is his by rights, when his aesthetic statement is so close and alive? I think it is due to superficial, hasty readings with frivolous labels, and also to the painter’s own character, not liable, given his acute and silent critical sense, to complacent self-references or practical strategies. Over and above bolder, overbearing voices, his complex discretion and shyness have fortunately left him fruitfully engrossed in his painting, which he now exhibits to us so categorically.
I venture not to question the range and calibre of his work, and to consider it masterful.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained, not even freedom.
Darío Villalba
(Extract from “Juan Giralt, maestro”, exhibition catalogue text for Palacio de Revillagigedo, Oviedo, 1997)