All art attempts to organise the world. In the case of painting the attempt occurs in a concrete physical space which is moreover confined. As it cannot expand any farther, when it is not mere illustration, painting looks mostly inwards. The driving aspiration is to seek a certain harmony in the discordant elements stemming from inside it, but making sure, to avoid simplification, that in that transition, discord is not misrepresented and does not lose its destabilising character. If there is no struggle, and it does not show through on the surface albeit subtly, there may be said to be no painting. The peculiarity of painting relative to other arts is that it allows the onlooker to take part in the dialectic, to contemplate both the process and the outcome, and to do this with the immediacy of a glance.
Juan Giralt’s painting springs from this conviction and grows with it. His stylistic offering involves stressing it to the limit, hence the variety of apparently contradictory elements in his works: on one hand, the constructive endeavour reflected in the geometrical division of space; on the other, the procedures (gesture, collage, use of words) with which he goes about breaking it up, turning it around and subverting it with a constant interplay of mirrors in which each formal option, each decision, also includes its opposite.
Marcos Giralt Torrente
(Extract from “Juan Giralt y la pintura”, article published in the magazine Masdearte, 8 April 2001)