“Process and balance. Also interruption. Everything in Juan Giralt’s painting arises from process and is always interrupted in a form of balance. Balance between construction and expression, order and intuition, unease and control, the force of colour and the harmonic moderation of tones. Juan Giralt always walks a tightrope at the boundary between figurative reference and the value of abstraction in painting itself without going over to one side or the other. Thus in some pictures he introduces written words, letters painted or inserted as fragments of collage. The letters in themselves are figurative elements given the attributes conferred on an abstract symbol: Sigurd Platten, Rapid, Fasching, Bodegón. Sometime they are mixed-up words, such Retor, for Retal (scrap) or Vererano for verano (summer), but an ambiguous reference is thereby introduced into the picture, a portion of experience that distorts abstraction as he does not make it explicit, and figuration, as he does not use representation. When abstraction predominates, the interplay of a word, a photo or a newspaper or magazine cutting displaces what is suggested by abstraction.
Balance as a form of radical expression. And also of an independence that has made Juan Giralt a painter displaced by the whirlwinds which in the world of the avant-garde generate classifications, launches and recognitions. But also frustrations.
Giralt’s painting has been a syncretic creation of the avant-garde. His painting is a Pandora’s box that many have opened to spread the good things in it, or, in the other version of the classical myth, the evils derived from copying and imitation. The syncretic character of his painting has made Juan Giralt a true representative of what on other occasions we have called “the displaced avant-garde”. Which does not prevent him from having been and continuing to be a precursor of many things and a renovator who proceeds alone, following only his own laws and convictions.”
Víctor Nieto Alcaide
(Extract from “Juan Giralt”, catalogue text for an exhibition at Caja de Salamanca y Soria, 1994)