Javier de Juan Spanish, b. 1958

Possessing a very personal and recognisable voice and a splendid mastery of drawing and colour, Javier de Juan became one of the most present and active artists in the field of drawing and painting in the eighties. In the early 1980s he began his artistic career as a painter and illustrator, at that time very much imbricated in the assumptions of the so-called New Spanish Figuration, made up of a series of very diverse artists, but at the same time with some common features - fundamentally a high figurative, colourist and narrative temperature.

His studies at the School of Architecture were to leave an unquestionable mark on his works, largely centred on urban themes, reflecting different aspects of the city, its buildings and streets, its dynamism, and above all the different archetypes and human genealogies that inhabit and populate his compositions.
 
Over the years, although his aesthetic, stylistic and expressive interests have logically evolved, being always very interested in the dissemination of his images through serial work, and even for some time now in the use of new languages and creative strategies, including video and digital processes, the fact is that a series of formal and conceptual features exist and are maintained in him that define and give meaning to his own voice as an artist.

Javier de Juan is above all a splendid draughtsman with an innate ability to tell stories through images. His technique is fresh, agile, clear and simple. With few lines and graphics he is capable of constructing scenes, situations, moments and, of course, emotions. His characters, men and women, are always recognisable and are animated by a special liveliness, full of energy, registers, movements and also sensuality.

Despite the fact that in his pieces the line and the graphics have their own voice that can be heard clearly, the truth is that Javier is an artist who manages to make the chromatic registers also present their candidature as important elements in his work. Colours with a marked warm texture, oranges, yellows, reds, which in turn are tempered and modulated with other shades closer to the cold kingdom of blues and greens.

He is an artist whose imaginary is nourished and supplied to a large extent by the fauna and flora that populate the diverse and variegated environment of the city. The streets, the cars, the passers-by, the illuminated signs, the buildings form a dynamic totuum revolutum and compose before our eyes an active and energetic urban song.

An artist who generates narratives and visual stories full of inventiveness and winks can never be without the warp and weft of the imaginative. Images yes, but undoubtedly images that are the offspring of his fertile imagination.