Javier de Juan: Scriptures

I started to work without previous premises, without rational objectives, without a plan. Paper on a wall or on the floor and let my hand run, rummaging through the folds of memory, of the subconscious. Recovering, I know this now, the pleasure of painting. Without any responsibility, as there is no project or objective. Just filling in papers without fear, for nothing, just because. Unsuspected things started to come out. Opinions around me, as I uploaded images of the process to the networks, related the result to the work of my beginnings in the early 80s, as if it were a return to the irresponsibility of youth. I hadn't realised until they told me.

Characters acting on each other. This is what came out of me, what the hand did at its own free will. I discovered that the biblical stories of our childhood, of our Judeo-Christian education, almost treated in a mythological tone, like marvellous tales, are imprinted as paradigms on our hard drive and sprang up as justification, as explanation or as an excuse to continue with the next image.  Then, as the head works in freedom, the Holy Scriptures become the trace that helps the hand to think even less. That its movement is automatic, fast, surprising. And so two guys fighting are Cain and Abel; men and women are Samson and Delilah or Judith and Holofernes ...

The sources of each are many and complex. Mine come out in this work without being able to hide: German expressionism, which I consider the joy of fierce and free painting as of those condemned to death who have nothing to lose. The American Pop of the 60s and 70s, with its sense of inconsequence, of aesthetics and above all its vocation to reach as many people as possible. Of the flight from sects of initiates and metalanguages.

And the cinema, comics, television and everything that is the world we have had to live in this 21st century. This last winter, the one of the apocalyptic snowfall and pandemic confusion, I have revised and completed the work already in Madrid and added some new pieces to the series. Perhaps underlining the pop and urban side of a work that began in the countryside by the sea.

I would just like to add that the title SCRIPTURES responds to the biblical theme on the one hand, but above all to the use of written texts on the paintings as another element to construct an image that wants to be a story, a sensation, a stimulus and to enrich a small space in the world for a short time.