If one looks at the pictures, papers, cut-outs and collages that Juan Giralt produced in the late 60s and early 70s, one is forcefully struck by the outflow of originality, new expressiveness, fresh creativity and, in a word, mastery, which Juan Giralt was showing already in his every brushstroke, in his visual ideas, in compositions as edgy today as on the first day. A whole period is conjured up like a wave by those works. But that is not all. In those crucial years for Spanish painting, Juan Giralt also contributed much to the most promising aesthetic and expressive developments, and his contribution was no less than that of other artists of the time who are perhaps better known simply because they found their way more easily into the ‘roll’ of distinguished names.
But such collections of names are futile and are recompiled every year, and time passes. And what we now have of Juan Giralt is his work of 20 years ago, and above that of the past few years. This contains much that is fascinating, though I don’t know if I can put it into words – the task isn’t easy. I would start with something very simple. I would describe his oeuvre as inward-looking, in that the artist has built up an inner world of forms and landscapes which, in each of his pictures, he explores again and again, never omitting any possible route. Nothing remains of the conflagrations of his early mannequins and unlikely figures, his little schizophrenic scenarios, halfway between comic-book scenes and the blasts which shocked the world on the atoll of Muroroa. The great mushroom dissipated in the atmosphere, and what subsists is just a repetitive phantasmal documentary image. But something even more important remains: a long twilight. That – the long twilight – with its phantasmic images, is, I think, what gives a special character to Juan Giralt’s later work, what makes his pictures compendiums of a highly personal way of seeing and living in our time. It is as if the colours were neutralised, and what remained in the memory were a deep green springing from the wet earth. Well, in this landscape which is just an idea, or rather an ideo-experience, the most diverse scenes emerge discreetly – scenes almost of dreams, taking us through the diary of a traveller making a long journey at once around the wide world and around the four walls of his studio.
Ignacio Gómez de Liaño
(Extract from “Juan Giralt”, catalogue text for an exhibition at Galería Arco Romano in Medinaceli, 1992)