JUAN GIRALT’S KALEIDOSCOPE
Juan Giralt: the first catalog I wrote the foreword for, in 1973, was his—the one for his solo exhibition at Juana de Aizpuru, back when it was still in Seville, a city I had just left the year before. We knew each other only slightly, from the Pamplona Encounters or a little before that, and later, of course, from Vandrés. I say catalog, but it was a modest leaflet, printed on pink paper. At the beginning of the text, I summarize his past in the fifties and sixties by alluding to London and Amsterdam, to Cobra (or CoBrA, as the purists write: I am not one) and to English Pop Art, and to his paintings of geometrized human profiles, and to his evolution parallel to that of his contemporaries (and gallery mates, since 1971) such as José Luis Alexanco, Luis Gordillo, and Darío Villalba, who are the three he mentions. After stating that his painting “speaks to the eye,” I refer to the simultaneity, fragmentation, and exuberant nature of the motifs (“water, sky with clouds, plants, grass, animals, meadow…”) on which his painting is based, noting its “spontaneous execution, with its lush and colorful quality.”
To write once again about that painting, for the first time with an overall view—albeit a limited one. To write a little in the manner in which he composed his paintings, from the late 1980s onward. Kaleidoscope Giralt, I titled it, but I could also have written “patchwork,” a term he liked to use to refer to his usual compositional style in that final phase: a lot of real or figurative collage, a lot of windows.
Born in 1940, in Madrid, on Calle de San Agustín, almost across from the Parliament. To a Catalan father, heir to a well-known glass and ceramics business that would eventually go under, and a Madrid-born mother, the daughter of a merchant. A father who spent the war in the capital, and a mother who spent it in Biarritz. Orphaned by his mother at an early age, he studied at the Colegio del Pilar, from which he would be expelled in 1954 after attempting to set it on fire.
I am not a storyteller, nor will I ever be one, though I do know how to tell true stories. His son, Marcos Giralt Torrente, whom I’ve known since he was a kid, is indeed a storyteller—and one of the best. In *Tiempo de vida* (2010), the beautiful yet stark novel he dedicated to his father, published by Anagrama, and essential reading for anyone seeking to understand his work and, above all, the man himself—a work that earned him that year’s National Fiction Prize— he portrays him, almost at the beginning, as “shy, introverted, and melancholic by nature,” adding: “but that doesn’t mean he was sad.” To conclude: “He detested any kind of solemnity, including that of sadness.”
Also: “He liked the city where he was born, Madrid, and he liked to read literature related to it.” I didn’t know the latter. I like to browse painters’ libraries; I’ve written about some, and I’ve been left wanting to write about others (for example, Morandi’s). In this case, I realize that I should have followed that lead regarding literature related to Madrid.
I spend a lot of time reading *Tiempo de vida*, though since it’s a novel, it naturally lacks a table of contents, which greatly complicates the kind of reading I’m currently engaged in—a documentary-style search for facts and clues. I sense, through the fragments the narrator uses, that Juan’s diaries—from which he sometimes incorporates excerpts in a collage-like manner—must be fascinating.
The first paintings that made a direct impression on Giralt in his childhood were those of a Madrid native from the 1920s who had become a prominent figure on the Argentine art scene (his family settled in Buenos Aires in 1937), specifically for their geometric perspective: José Antonio Fernández Muro, married to his Buenos Aires colleague Sarah Grilo, whose work is now enjoying a strong resurgence on the international market. Giralt saw those paintings at the home of one of his aunts, who was married to one of Fernández Muro’s brothers and was the mother of the actress Marta Fernández Muro. Determined to become a painter himself, the teenager did not enroll at San Fernando, but, rebellious from the start, he learned the basics of the craft in the studio of another painter, Joaquín Pacheco, just six years his senior, whom he met in 1954 through Monsi Giralt, his sister. There is a charming photograph documenting that apprenticeship. That period also marked the beginning of his lifelong friendship with another budding painter, Adolfo Arrieta, a fellow student at the Ida School (which he entered after Estudio), who would become the most secretive and singular of our filmmakers, and some of whose early works in the field of art (paintings, but also black-and-white lithographs of a strange poetry) we were able to discover in 2021 thanks to Espacio Valverde. Giralt and Arrieta would go on to shoot several Super 8 films together and write a lost play, *Juana y el mundo*, which Arrieta recalls as having been influenced by Tennessee Williams. Another lovely snapshot is the one from 1957, in which they are seen walking down a street in Paris, where, with the memory of their reading of Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour, tristesse still fresh, they had traveled with the intention of listening to live jazz. From the following year is the first painting by Giralt that we know of, precisely his hallucinatory portrait of Arrieta in shades of blue. Later, Arrieta would move to the French capital, where, having definitively set aside his paintbrushes, he would become the cult filmmaker he is today.
The then-apprentice painter had first caught a glimpse of the City of Light in 1950s Madrid, through his older sister, Carmen, who would go on to star in several iconic films of the Transition era (by Iván Zulueta, Pedro Almodóvar, Augusto Martínez Torres, and Fernando Colomo). Carmen Giralt’s portrait is sketched by her nephew in “An Admirable Woman,” the first chapter of his book, also published by Anagrama, *Algún día seré recuerdo* (2023). Carmen subscribed to Elle, a Parisian weekly that, at the time, was being clipped by artists then based in Madrid—as modern as Coti Feduchi or Juan Ignacio Cárdenas—for their illustrations in the weekly Blanco y Negro.
One of the first modern revelations the teenage painter experienced was coming across, in another Parisian weekly, the general-interest Paris Match, a few pages dedicated to Matisse, in which he was dazzled by the images of the Chapelle du Rosaire that the artist had created for the Dominicans in Vence. The feature, authored by the then-famous photojournalist Walter Carone (Hergé’s “Walter Rizotto” in The Castafiore Emerald!), appeared in 1950 in an issue whose cover featured the American actress Leslie Caron. It is also worth noting that, when interviewed for Letras Libres by Beatriz Mingo Costales during his solo exhibition at Espacio Valverde, Arrieta confessed his own passion for the French artist: “I think Matisse was the first painter who fascinated me.”
In 1958, Giralt managed to convince his father to let him go to London, where he enrolled at the Central School of Art and Crafts, where he was taught by a certain William Millar, about whom we know very little. We do, however, know of some of the students who came out of that school: Eric Gill, Lucian Freud, Victor Pasmore, David Hicks, Terence Conran... London was a curious choice, since, unlike Paris, it has never been a frequent destination for Spanish artists. There, he immersed himself firsthand in the work of Bacon and other painters, including those of the nascent Pop Art movement. Giralt saw Bacon’s work in person, just as Gordillo would in 1963, the year he lived there and painted a “Bacon Head,” but other Spanish neo-figurative artists, such as Barjola, Julio Martín-Caro, and Fernando Sáez, were influenced more indirectly, through magazines and books. Moreover, it was in that London that the aspiring painter encountered the traveling exhibition New American Painting from New York’s MoMA, curated by its director, Alfred H. Barr, which visited eight European cities, including Madrid, where it was enthusiastically received by the members of El Paso. Previously, Giralt had encountered some examples of this type of painting through Juan Eduardo Cirlot’s pioneering book *El arte otro* (1957), published by Seix Barral. The influence of the Americans on him is not apparent at that time, but rather that of Dubuffet, one of the artists discussed in the aforementioned volume by the Barcelona-based poet and art critic, and earlier by Michel Tapié, the coiner of the term “art autre” and one of Dubuffet’s key partners in the endeavor to promote art brut.
1959, the year he was still living in the British capital—from which he would return the following year—marked his entry into the Madrid art scene, with a solo exhibition held at the Fernando Fe bookstore-gallery, located in Puerta del Sol, where a few years earlier Manuel Conde, a poet and art critic, had organized exhibitions for several of the future members of El Paso and other pioneers of Spanish abstraction. Among the reviews of that exhibition, which featured hallucinatory, somewhat clownish figures, sometimes forming crowds with a style somewhere between Munch and, precisely, Dubuffet (a good example: the untitled collage, dated in London, which is the oldest work of his held by the Reina Sofía), there was an enthusiastic one by Manuel Sánchez Camargo in Pueblo. Two years later, his second solo show, secured for him by the poet and art critic Ángel Crespo, took place at another bookstore-gallery geographically close to the previous one, Carmina Abril’s, on Calle del Arenal. Those of us who have researched the 1950s and 1960s know that these two spaces—which my generation still managed to experience (albeit in their decline)—were significant: the first for Informalism, and the second for figurative art (including Estampa Popular). He also frequented the other two bookstores-galleries of interest in that Madrid: Clan, and the German Buchholz, the latter of which we also got to know, and also in its decline. Around that time, Giralt was still seeing Joaquín Pacheco; together, they took Jorge Castillo under their wing. After spending his childhood and adolescence in Argentina, Castillo had returned to Spain in 1956 under precarious circumstances, and, though he still lacked a studio of his own, he would occasionally paint in the studios of the two Madrid artists; From that time, Giralt would always keep a line drawing portrait that the artist from Pontevedra had made of him, which I liked when I discovered it in a corner of his studio. Crespo, in a 1962 article in Artes, refers to Giralt’s early period, connecting it to the respective artistic worlds of his two friends: “Blue paintings, with a cool tone, somewhat influenced, if not by the technique, then by the world of the draftsman Castillo, and not far removed from Pacheco’s synthetic expressionism.”
Sánchez Camargo and Ángel Crespo were not the only art critics to take notice of our painter; indeed, his earliest press clippings, from the 1960s and 1970s, include the names of virtually everyone who mattered in Madrid at the time: J. R. Alfaro, Enrique Azcoaga, Isabel Cajide, Antonio Manuel Campoy, José de Castro Arines, Raúl Chávarri, the American William Dyckes (very close to Zóbel), Ramón D. Faraldo, Luis Figuerola Ferretti, Elena Flórez, Manuel Augusto García Viñolas, José María Iglesias (primarily a painter, as well as a visual poet, but also an important art critic and curator), José María Moreno Galván (who in 1968 included him in his monumental book *La última vanguardia*, the first highly successful attempt, full of accurate insights, to systematize an overview of Spanish painting during that historical period), Víctor Nieto Alcaide, and Cirilo Popovici.
In 1962, Giralt settled for a time in Paris, where Joaquín Pacheco had just moved. There he would also connect with Alberto Greco, the Argentine meteor who would soon shake up the Madrid scene, as well as with a compatriot and friend of the latter, the sculptor Alberto Heredia (there is a photograph of the Madrid native with him in the garden of the Musée Rodin, in front of L’âge d’airain), himself a singular and excessive creator, whom I would come to know much later. In the French capital, where he produced a series of expressionist paintings in somber colors depicting women with large heads, large eyes, and large breasts, the Madrid-born artist collaborated with Greco on his first *Vivo Dito*. Giralt would see him again in Madrid in 1963–1964, where he would also frequent another meteorite from the New World, the Uruguayan poet Julio Campal, then the driving force behind the literary cycles of Problemática 63, and the father of Spanish visual poetry.
We don’t know much about the solo exhibition that the ever-restless Giralt—who always had one foot outside the Iberian Peninsula—held in 1963 at the Mokum Gallery in Amsterdam, the city where he lived for eight months that year. But both the beautiful and effective woodcut poster published to announce it, as well as some of the works exhibited there that have been preserved—very turbulent and impasto-like (see, for example, the untitled canvas in the Reina Sofía)—or some engravings, or photos of others whose whereabouts are unknown, speak to his great affinity with the poetics of Cobra, the transnational experimental group (Co for Copenhagen, Br for Brussels, A for Amsterdam), which in its early days had a Spanish correspondent (Francisco Nieva), and four of whose members—the Belgian Pierre Alechinsky, the Dane Asger Jorn, and the Dutchmen Lucebert and Bert Schierbeek—had close ties to our country. The last of those mentioned, an experimental poet and storyteller who created three Spanish photobooks (with Nico Jesse, Cas Oorthuys, and Kees Scherer—all three excellent photographers), had a home in Fo He wrote the brief introductory text about the Madrid-based artist that appeared on the invitation to that exhibition. In 1979, he also penned the foreword to the catalog for Saura’s exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In addition to visiting that and other art galleries, we know that while in the city of canals, Giralt spent time with three colleagues: Ger Lataster, Jan Sierhuis, and the Argentine Julio Romera (graphic contributor to the magazine *Poesía de España*, edited by Ángel Crespo and Gabino-Alejandro Carriedo, and whose work Juana Mordó exhibited at Biosca that same year, 1963)—all three then very much in the spotlight, and also aligned, especially the first, with a Cobra-style aesthetic, though none of the three were actually members of the group.
I have just mentioned Saura, and certainly more than one work from that very early Giralt, including the two 1964 works featured in the retrospective for whose catalog I am writing this text, has a Saura-esque quality, due to the obsessive presence of the human face and the use of those characteristic blacks and reds, which Saura shares with Millares, as well as with El Greco himself.
Also in the Dutch vein (at least in part), it is worth recalling that in that same year, 1963, Giralt took part in his first group exhibition: a three-part show at the Forum Gallery in Madrid, featuring Arrieta (whose collection has since included two of his friend’s paintings from that year, very much in the Cobra spirit) and with Pieter Holstein, a painter of that nationality, then himself in that vein, and later a draftsman with a clear line and great charm.
1964 was the year of his multicolored and festive tile mural, quite Cobra-esque (as late as 1989–1991, there would be a Kermesse evoking typically northern festivities and the Flemish masters of yore), for the Parador Nacional de Ayamonte. But above all, it was the year he married the most modern of Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s daughters, Marisa Torrente, whose sister Marisé would become Julio Zachrisson’s partner in 1966, whom she would marry in 1987. Marisa and Marisé’s brother, the undaunted bohemian Gonzalo Torrente Malvido, has also been the subject of a novel by his nephew. Marisa and Juan’s wedding was attended by their closest family, the Arrietas, and the unforgettable Maruja Mallo, who had just returned from her exile in Argentina! And that last name reminds me of the filmmaker’s unfulfilled wish to cast her in one of his films. We must mention Greco, then living in Madrid, whom Marisa was helping at the time in his short-lived but legendary private gallery in his home by the Manzanares River, where works by Millares, Saura, and Pablo Serrano were exhibited, while pieces arrived from abroad by the Portuguese artists René Bertholo and Lourdes Castro (the unforgettable founders of the exceptional Parisian magazine Kwy), as well as from Samuel Buri, Christo, Marta Minujín, and Jan Voss—a story very well told by Quico Rivas in the corresponding section of that masterpiece, the catalog of the Greco retrospective he curated for the IVAM in 1991. In that Madrid from which he would soon leave for Barcelona, where he would take his own life, the Argentine also frequented José Ayllón, Juana Mordó, Lucio Muñoz, Manuel Viola, and Laurence Iché, the Edurnes, and the ZAJs, but also younger people, such as Arrieta (to whom he introduced Jean Vigo’s *Zéro de conduite*), Eduardo Arroyo, the fellow Argentine Adolfo Estrada, the Danish painter Peter Valentiner, Darío Villalba, and Zachrisson. And figures from the world of flamenco, such as La Chunga and Enrique Morente. It is worth noting that in 1965, both Millares (with the added bonus of a concert by ZAJ) and Giralt held solo exhibitions in Lisbon, at the headquarters of *Diário de Noticias*, the latter with a catalog foreworded by the faithful Ángel Crespo, who refers to his European connections and the parallels between his art and Pop Art, as well as with the Crónica de la Realidad—a somewhat disconcerting assessment, since that parallelism does not seem to me, unless I have missed some chapter of this history, to correspond to what was then at work in the Madrid artist’s oeuvre.
Given my own enthusiasm (some might say: obsession) for Brazil, I would like to know more about the two years (1965–1966) that the Giralts spent in São Paulo, also venturing to Rio, Bahia, Brasília, the Northeast, and the Amazon and the territory of the Carajás and Tapirapés Indians. I cannot find many references to that period in any of the critical texts on the painter, with the exception of Enrique Andrés Ruiz’s essay in the catalog of an exhibition to which I will refer later, a text in which he speculates on the influence that geometries from there—such as those of Lygia Clark or Milton Dacosta—might have had on him. The choice of Brazil is, in any case, a bold, modern one: Brasília was also frequently featured in *Paris Match*. We know for a fact that he associated with his colleagues Aldemir Martins (a proponent of poetic figuration, who would exhibit in Madrid in 1962 at Neblí, with a catalog featuring a foreword by the inevitable Ángel Crespo), and Fernando Odriozola, an Asturian by birth who arrived in Brazil in 1953 and was a member of the international surrealist group Phases. Brazil has been, throughout the last century, a destination for quite a few Spanish artists. Off the top of my head, I recall the architect Antonio García Moya, the pianist Tomás Terán, Rosa Chacel, the poets Alfonso Pintó and Manuel Segalá, the gallery owner Salvador Riera, the photographers Marcel and Palmira Giró, and even today, Adolfo Montejo Navas... And above all, the painters: Odriozola, yes, but also Timoteo Pérez Rubio, Francesc Domingo, Joan Ponç, Francisco Peinado, Manuel Calvo, Julio Plaza... Among the Spanish intellectuals of his time, Ángel Crespo was the most Brazil-oriented, a fact determined in part by the commission he received from João Cabral de Melo to direct the distinguished Revista de Cultura Brasileña, published starting in 1962 by that country’s embassy, and whose first issues feature a beautiful minimalist cover by Calvo. In São Paulo, note specifically the reunion between Giralt and the poet and critic from La Mancha, who was touring the country accompanied by his wife, the essayist and translator Pilar Gómez Bedate.
In 1965, Giralt held a solo exhibition of neo-figurative paintings—though no longer influenced by the Cobra movement—at Galeria Seta in São Paulo, accompanied by a modest catalog featuring a note from the gallery owner, Pedro Manuel Gismondi, who had founded the gallery three years earlier; the exhibition drew reviews from two prominent critics, José Geraldo Vieira and Ivo Zanini. One of those paintings, titled Cabeza, was acquired by the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade. In the gallery’s roster, active until 1986, and whose geometric logo was designed by Hércules Barsotti and Willys de Castro, we find many interesting names. Among them are, for example—and I’m abbreviating greatly because I’m aware that all this is little known here— Sepp Baendereck (of Yugoslav origin, very active in the Amazonian cause), the printmaker Marcelo Grassmann, Eleonore Koch (a highly subtle painter, a disciple of Alfredo Volpi, recently introduced to the Madrid public by Distrito Cuatro), the sculptor Tomoshige Kusuno, the legendary pop artist Wesley Duke Lee, the conceptual artist Nelson Leirner, the excellent geometric painter and designer Antônio Maluf (who would acquire the gallery in 1965), Montez Magno (a refined painter and experimental poet who had lived in Madrid in the early 1960s thanks to a grant from Cultura Hispánica), Ubirajara Ribeiro (close to Augusto de Campos), and the also pop artist Cybèle Varela...
Also in 1965, Giralt was one of the twenty-four artists selected by Luis González Robles for the Spanish pavilion at the Biennial in the Brazilian metropolis, among whom were César Arias, Doroteo Arnaiz, Juan Barjola, Juan Genovés, Francisco Hernández, Juan Hernández Pijuán, José María Iglesias, José P. Jardiel, Julio Martín-Caro, Julián Martín de Vidales, Ceferino Moreno, Jaume Muxart, Joan Ponç, Joaquín Rubio Camín, Julián Santamaría, Eduardo Sanz, Antonio Suárez, and Darío Villalba (who, incidentally, would go on to win the coveted Grand Prize for Painting at the same biennial eight years later).
Also in 1966, Giralt was one of the twenty-five artists selected by González Robles himself for the Spanish pavilion at the other major biennial of that time, the Venice Biennale, as well as for the album of lithographs featuring fifteen of them, in which his work appears alongside that of María Droc, José Luis Galicia, Pedro García Ramos, José Luis García Severo, Juan Genovés, Francisco Hernández, José María Iglesias, Antonio Lorenzo, Julián Martín de Vidales, Manuel S. Méndez, Jesús Núñez, Francisco Peinado, Vicente Vela, and Ignacio Yraola. (The other ten participants in the exhibition were Andreu Alfaro, Federico Echevarría, Juana Francés, Amadeo Gabino, Manuel Gómez Raba, Remigio Mendiburu, Dimitri Perdikidis, Joaquín Rubio Camín, Eduardo Sanz, and Salvador Soria).
Passionate at the time for the art of printmaking, which he practiced in Madrid at the studio of Puerto Rican artist Marcos Irizarry—a close friend of Zachrisson’s and his collaborator in the early 1960s on the exciting venture of the clandestine printing press in San Fernando in 1967, as well as a participant in the Ljubljana Print Biennial— Giralt spent a few months in his beloved Paris, thanks to a grant from the Juan March Foundation, learning the technique of color etching with Stanley William Hayter, an English surrealist painter and printmaker, and founder of the legendary Atelier 17. The previous year, he had been one of the Spaniards with work exhibited at the fifth edition of the Biennial in the French capital, an edition in which the practitioners of Pop Art—and especially political Pop Art—played a major role, although prominent Op and kinetic artists and members of the Zero group were also featured. With that stay in Paris, during which he produced etchings that would earn him an award in Tokyo, one could say that his formative period—and his extended stays abroad—came to a close, although other months in Paris in 1975, his New York season (1980–1981), and a visit to Warsaw (1986) in the company of Alexanco, Genovés, and Zachrisson. Aside from a few private trips to countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which, as will be seen, would be reflected in his work.
Arrieta, who as a painter had held a solo exhibition in 1965 at a gallery as cutting-edge at the time as Edurne, would write the foreword to the catalog of the exhibition that Giralt presented in 1969 at a venue as prominent at the time as the Prado Hall of the Ateneo. In this solo exhibition, abandoning Cobra (a movement that, incidentally, also fascinated Arrieta, who in the aforementioned interview with Bárbara Mingo Costales cites Karel Appel) and any expressionist tendencies, our painter undergoes a shift—if not toward the Chronicle of Reality, then toward a pop art style featuring human profiles reduced to the bare minimum, stereotyped almost to the point of being symbolic, and rendered using flat tints. Adult figures, as well as children still within their mother’s womb, in a fetal position: see, for example, Univitelinos (1968). One of the best examples, the diptych on táblex from the same year, *Siluetas gris y rosa*, was acquired by the State and is now in the Reina Sofía. Julio Trenas described this type of work as “unfolded silhouettes” in *La Vanguardia*. Campoy, for his part, in his alphabetical review, illustrated by Dos siluetas, emphasized that it was an exhibition of “painting close to American Pop Art, but made by a painter,” also referring, in the following note, in which he reviews an exhibition by Enrique Salamanca at Edurne, to that movement, which was indeed very present in our studios at the time. What Giralt proposes in that solo exhibition is related to what Juan Antonio Aguirre (of television fame), José Luis Alexanco, Miguel Ángel Anadón, Anzo, Luis Delacámara, and Luis Gordillo were doing at the time, the Antonio Muntadas of the pre-Vandrés era (the one from his 1971 solo show at the Ateneo, a show that, although I didn’t live here at the time, was the first of his I saw), or Darío Villalba—a list to which we could add, broadening the spectrum a bit, contemporary works by the Argentine (and then a resident of Madrid) Rómulo Macció, who exhibited in those years at Edurne and later at Juana Mordó, or something from the more pop-oriented Francisco Echauz or even Eduardo Úrculo, or the series of little men by a former geometric artist who later turned to social realism (and, as I have already indicated, to Brazil) such as Manuel Calvo. The silhouette was in the air, one might say. A poetics from which Giralt would soon depart, returning to a more gestural style of painting, with intuition as his guiding principle. And at the same time, Marcos is right when he recalls that “he always retained a pop sensibility that kept him from dismissing kitsch.”
Flat colors, he said, and although Giralt, unlike his friend Alexanco, never worked as a graphic designer, it is worth mentioning, in passing, his bread-and-butter job, around that time—though not for very long—as a layout artist at the newspaper *Informaciones*, which was widely read at the time.
In 1970, he held a solo exhibition of etchings, still in the same pop vein as his show the previous year, with Fefa Seiquer, one of the best gallery owners in Madrid at the time (she had once been associated with Zachrisson and occasionally exhibited works by two of the Spanish artists on the Brazilian list, Manuel Calvo and Julio Plaza), despite how tiny her space was at the time—a veritable hovel across from the Sala Santa Catalina at the Ateneo. There, one could appreciate Giralt’s skill as an engraver in creating variations on a single theme and in integrating the figure into repetitive structures of a constructivist lineage. From a print featuring three of his characteristic silhouettes, he presented no fewer than 36 successive variations, all reduced to the black, red, and white of the page. In others, he revisits the motif of children in fetal positions, a motif also featured in the beautiful silkscreen poster announcing the exhibition.
However, his time at Seiquer was to be very brief, for the following year brought a decisive turning point in his life: his joining the team of another gallery that had just opened, with far greater resources and housed in a larger space: Vandrés, where the owner, the American Gloria Kirby, appointed Fernando Vijande as director, ably assisted by Marisa Torrente. The painter’s involvement in that venture would be significant. Thanks to him, Vandrés welcomed, among others, Alexanco, Gordillo, José P. Jardiel, Joaquín Mouliaá, and Darío Villalba. There he would also make new friends: the German Michael Buthe, the American Bob Smith, the Valencian Jordi Teixidor, the Chilean sculptor Raúl Valdivieso, and the Catalan Alberto Porta—better known as Zush (now Evrugo)—whom he would paint in 1973, and of the five, the one with whom he felt the greatest personal and artistic rapport…
The first of Giralt’s three solo exhibitions at the gallery on Don Ramón de la Cruz Street took place in 1971. The impressive Triptych that dominated the space, nearly two meters high by over four meters wide, in which the artist invites us to gaze upon a labyrinthine interior filled with figures and designer furniture of the style popular at the time, entered the state collections and is now in the Reina Sofía, as is another canvas from the same year, mysteriously titled Warsaw. Announced with a dazzling red poster, the exhibition featured a catalog that did not include the usual critical text, but rather a simultaneous, deranged urban litany authored by the Galician avant-garde poet Carlos Oroza, now a cult figure. That exhibition, along with the next two, made Giralt’s work one of the most prominent on the Spanish art scene at the time, and made it possible for his work to be seen in galleries throughout the provinces—all of which were part of a circuit that represented a modernity gradually taking hold across the country: Juana de Aizpuru in Seville (I have already mentioned his solo show there in 1973, but by the end of the previous year he had participated, in the same gallery, in the curious group show *Sobre el barroco*, which also featured work by *Equipo Múltiple*), *La Casa del Siglo XV* in Segovia, *Temps* in Valencia (1974: the catalog was banned by the police and destroyed, for an alleged offense against the Catholic religion), Ivan Spence in Ibiza, and Varrón in Salamanca—a list to which we should add an institutional space, that of the Caja de Ahorros de Navarra in Pamplona, then intelligently managed by the painter Javier Morrás.
In 1971, he participated in the eclectic and controversial group exhibition *Vandrés Eros y el arte actual* (first censored and eventually shut down), as well as in another exhibition at the same gallery focused on the theme of mannequins—a subject so characteristic of Chirico and Ramón and once again in vogue at the time. The following year, Giralt took part in the major anti-Franco exhibition in Milan, *Amnistia: Che trata di Spagna, with a catalog featuring a striking cover designed based on the colors of the Republican flag, a copy of which I still have because Equipo Múltiple was also included in the long list of selected artists.
His paintings from the early part of that decade are energetic, an adjective I have always associated with the figure and work of José Guerrero (when I speak of him, I almost prefer to write it in English: energetic), but which here may serve to refer to an everyday landscape playfully transcended (his cloud, and above all his lawn, of which the painter depicts every blade of grass) such as the one he presents in La parcela (1970), the panel he had sent to Amnistia, now owned, like quite a few other works exhibited at the time, by the CGIL, Italy’s most powerful trade union. Or to the gouache *Monument in the Forest* (1971). Or to *Woman with Dog* (1971) in reds, pinks, and greens, a woman who, like many of the figures that populate these works, is embedded within a geometric structure. Or to the aforementioned *Triptych* and *Warsaw*, both from 1971; or *The Dog* (1972), reminiscent of a children’s story, entangled in an equally rigid form; or *The Armchair* (1972). Or a drawing in which *La Pinocha* (1973) is outlined in red against a green background; or, from the same year, another of a *Rhinoceros*.
There is a color photograph of Giralt on a street in Pamplona, during the Encuentros, the brilliant finale in July 1972 of Spanish experimentalism, and my first job outside of writing, though related to it: as part of the press team. In that photograph, the painter poses alongside his friend and contemporary Alexanco (co-organizer, with Luis de Pablo, of that magnificent event), engineer Mario Fernández Barberá (promoter of the Computable Forms seminars at the University of Madrid’s Computing Center), sculptor and ceramist Joan Gardy Artigas, filmmaker and storyteller Gonzalo Suárez, and Isidoro Valcárcel Medina. The reason for his presence in the Navarran capital: his participation in the Encuentros, as co-author, with Tomás Marco, of Recuerdos del porvenir (the composer came up with the title in Mexico: it was the name of a pulque bar he stumbled upon), an electroacoustic work in which the painter, for the creation of his part of the piece, collaborated with photographer Juan Fernández-Muro, son of the aforementioned Spanish-Argentine painter couple.
According to the composer himself, the piece was “open music tailored to Juan Giralt’s paintings,” projected in the form of a slideshow, with a result that, as I recall, was somewhat reminiscent of a magic lantern show. A work, as Marco himself explains in the Encuentros catalog, conceived as “a coordination of freedoms between the musician, the visual artist, the performer, and the audience, which influences the very development of the sound process.”
In 1974, his second solo exhibition at Vandrés, *Papeles, recortables y collages*, was highly praised, in the aforementioned *Triunfo* section, by Moreno Galván, for how, in his view, the exhibition reconciled “a certain formal geometrism in the structures,” and “an anti-formal and expressive spontaneity, at times verging on humor and caricature.” The truth is that Giralt, while continuing to work in large or even very large formats, then emphasized his commitment—which would become a habit for him from that point on—to fragile media (including tabloid sheets), a courageous commitment, especially considering that at that time Spanish collectors were totally averse to paper. Painters such as Zóbel, Rueda and Torner (by the way: all three purchased works from that exhibition, and I remember one of them very well, hanging in the Madrid home of the last of the three) were notable exceptions in that regard. Things gradually began to change, partly due to the proliferation of printmaking workshops: Mitsuo Miura’s for screen printing (with whom Giralt collaborated on editions for the Sen Gallery), and Grupo Quince’s for lithography.
1976, the year of a trip around the Mediterranean (Italy, Greece, Turkey) in the company of Gloria Kirby, Daniela Tilkin, Blanca Sánchez, and Bob Smith, was also the year of his last solo show at Vandrés (the previous year, Marisa Torrente had stopped working there), which also took him to the Basel Art Fair. Portrait with Three Dogs, dating from that year, is now owned by the Fundació Suñol in Barcelona. We should also mention Nocturne (1975); Madona I and Horse Bust, both from 1976, the latter at the Reina Sofía; Monument in the Garden (1977), located in Santiago, Chile, at the Salvador Allende Solidarity Museum, which, like the aforementioned CGIL museum, houses a significant collection of Spanish art; or Control Tower Figure (1978), part of the Olontia Collection in Gibraleón. All of these compositions feature a frontal figure with a somewhat totemic quality, possessing a volume and a harshness—including in color—that are uncommon both before and after in the artist’s body of work. In contrast, his prolific, Piranesian drawings from that period emphasize the automatist element. In them, his groping search seems to lead him almost into the realm of a surrealism akin to that practiced by the Chilean artist Roberto Matta. There is no shortage, then, of images of high erotic voltage, such as Self Control (1974), which is in the collection of the CA2M in Móstoles. In this context, it is interesting to note his interest, at that time, in the radical aesthetics of Jim Nutt, a member of the Chicago School led by Peter Saul. A school that also held Alcolea’s attention at the same time.
In 1978—that is, two years after his last solo show at Vandrés—Giralt, following a serious falling-out with Fernando Vijande, the result of palace intrigues, would be abruptly ousted from that gallery to which he had devoted so much effort. Obviously, following that rift, he would not be considered by the gallery owner for the famous 1980 group exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York, nor, the following year, when it came time to choose his own team for the spectacular, now one-man venue he opened in a former garage in the same Salamanca neighborhood. Following that episode—the end of an era, which he experienced as traumatic (see the various accounts from his associates on the matter, and note, as of 2015, some excessive reactions to them, which only reflect the tenacious persistence of the factions of that time)—his journey through the wilderness would begin.
After four years of almost total silence, broken only by a few minor group shows, in 1980 Giralt exhibited collages at Ruiz-Castillo. He then spent part of that year and the next in New York, thanks to a grant from the Joint Hispanic-American Committee that allowed him to study at the Pratt Institute. I like a color snapshot from 1980 in which he is seen in his Manhattan studio, with sunlight casting subtle shadows on the wooden floor. There he would reunite with two old friends: Jorge Castillo, at the height of an international fame that would later wane, and the sensitive American abstract painter Joan Semmel, who had exhibited at Juana Mordó in the 1960s. There he would meet Cristina Iglesias and Juan Muñoz, who were living there at the time, and later Francisco Leiro, Victoria Civera, and Juan Uslé. It was then in New York that Giralt developed a deep fascination with the Big Apple, to which he would return several times, holding three solo exhibitions: one in 1992 at the Municipal Archives, and two others in 1993 and 1995, both at the Z Gallery.
An important milestone—and the beginning of the end of the aforementioned journey through the wilderness—was his 1984 solo exhibition at Fauna’s, where his shift toward a more abstract style became evident. The exhibition included a catalog with a foreword (“Poems or Paintings”) by a particularly brilliant Santos Amestoy. At Fauna’s—a venue lacking the glamour of Vandrés, let alone Vijande’s garage—he would hold solo exhibitions again in 1987 (the year of two seminal works: a new Nocturno, particularly abstract and essential, whose composition foreshadows others that would soon become characteristic of the artist’s new direction; and a work on paper from the same year constructed from a collage of a black-and-white erotic photograph) and 1990. The late poet and critic from Soria would reinforce his view of our mutual friend’s work with an important article in the April 1988 issue of the short-lived magazine Cyan, regarding the 1987 exhibition: “Juan Giralt, paradigm of a necessary reevaluation.” At the last of those solo exhibitions, the Bank of Spain purchased the diptych titled *May* (1990). This was followed by a period of wandering through Madrid’s art scene: *Amparo Bárcena* (1991; it is in my foreword to that catalog that I discuss her journey through the wilderness, while also emphasizing the diary-like quality that has always characterized her painting), Afinsa-Almirante (1994, Calco-manías, a catalog with a foreword by Marcos Ricardo Barnatán, and an exhibition I reviewed in ABC, titling my article “Juan Giralt, at His Best”), and Metta (1998). To this list must be added a series of solo exhibitions outside Madrid: at Rosa Ventosa in Barcelona (1996, introduced by a pioneering art critic such as Maria Lluïsa Borrás); at Miguel Marcos’ galleries, both in the Catalan capital (2001) and in Zaragoza (2002); and at Alfredo Viñas in Málaga (2003). And above all, his 1992 exhibition (catalog with text by Ignacio Gómez de Liaño) at that island or miracle of new art that was Arco Romano in Medinaceli (where Giralt had a house where he often took refuge), run by the late Pepe Arense (the gallery, on the upper floor of the inn of the same name, which he also owned). In the town in Soria, where we met on occasion, the painter became part of a cosmopolitan and unique artistic community, in which Gómez de Liaño himself stood out (for whom Medinaceli is a bit like Alfred Kubin’s “Pearl City”), along with colleagues such as the American (and adherent to an abstraction of the sublime) Frank Carmelitano, the Argentine Rómulo Macció (mentioned earlier), Fernando Mastretta, and the Austrian Reiner Schiestl, thanks to whom Giralt would hold several solo exhibitions in that country.
Also worth noting, as two major milestones in his process of reconnecting with the public, were his inclusion by Miguel Fernández-Cid in the 1995 edition of the Salón de los 16, and his winning, in 1996, of the L’Oréal Prize—then the most coveted private award in Spain—for his dazzling, delightful painting Simba from that year. And his two solo exhibitions in his beloved Paris, in 1996 and 2000, at the Galerie du Fleuve, a venue that hosted exhibitions by, among others, the Italians Enrico Baj and Gastone Novelli, the Peruvian Herman Braun-Vega, the New Zealander John Forrester, and the German Jan Voss, who at Kwy had coincided, among many others, with Alberto Greco, Millares, and Saura.
A period of creative abundance followed, as evidenced by his three exhibitions at Antonio Machón in 2001, 2003, and 2006. The self-preface to the catalog of the second exhibition is so characteristic of him—and so excellent. In it, he explains his musings, underscores the importance of collage in his system, and proclaims his aversion to literary titles, with a very direct indirect reference to his contemporary Eduardo Arroyo, whose famous depiction of Ganivet’s suicide he mentions with a touch of sarcasm. A text full of expressive insights. “I like very smudged painting.” And this other line: “The paintings that simmer like a stew on the canvas in a direct process seem to retain the life and energy accumulated during the work sessions you’ve dedicated to them.”
The Barcelona-based critic Jaume Vidal Oliveras quite rightly says that “Juan Giralt constructs painting as a sort of utopia or Arcadia,” a construction regarding which he also reveals an interesting fact: the painter kept a photographic record of the successive stages of his paintings. On the excellent Giralt-themed website recently launched, there is indeed a section showing one of them in its sixteen! successive stages.
Marcos Giralt Torrente, once again—though in this case not in his novel, but in his contribution to the catalog of the Reina Sofía retrospective: “It is not far-fetched to glimpse, in some of the materials used in his collages (calligraphy notebooks, maps, animal trading cards…), the postwar child sitting at an uncomfortable desk.”
I reread *Tiempo de vida*. Although the author is neither a critic nor an art historian, but one of the finest storytellers of his generation, how well put this is: “I emphasize joy to highlight one of my father’s defining traits, his longing to be happy, to recapture the lightness that the passage of time tends to make more difficult, less permanent.” How well said, and how fitting it is to accompany my own gaze as a visitor dazzled by the galleries where, at the MARCO, Giralt’s work is on display, just as it was previously displayed at the Reina Sofía (2015) or in Cayón (2020, with a very daring installation, but in my opinion very successful, and also very joyful—let’s use that adjective again)—the paintings I would call those of plenitude. Many of these paintings are very much in the style of Matisse, and also very much in the vein of Richard Diebenkorn, another outsider whose artistic direction I’ve always particularly admired, and a name mentioned by Santos Amestoy in that Fauna’s catalog. But ultimately, neither the Frenchman nor the Californian, nor other influences on our painter—such as Mondrian or Philip Guston (cited by him, alongside Uccello, Utamaro, Velázquez, the Fayum painters, Rothko, and Gottlieb, in the aforementioned 2003 text)—are anything other than beacons, beloved points of reference. And those paintings, created when he was already in his sixties, when he was no longer in the limelight, when, already ravaged by the illness that would eventually take his life, he struggled to remain true to his most intimate convictions, are ultimately the most deeply his own of all, and constitute a resplendent (and moving) confirmation that art is a struggle against death, and ultimately triumphs over it: the very lesson encapsulated in the small painting that in 1946 marked the culmination of Bonnard’s long career—that almond tree in bloom, 57 centimeters high by 34 wide, now in the Pompidou.
“Giralt’s painting, to put it simply, catches the eye,” I wrote in 1973, before going on to describe the “vibrant and colorful” aspect of his “spontaneous style.” All of this is even more evident in his work from the 1990s and the following decade—work of such intensity and beauty.
The first thing that strikes us in this final phase is the color, more vibrant than ever. A physical, resounding impact, especially in the case of the large-format works. Navy blues, the blue of that Portuguese Azulejo (1992–1993) that I already liked when it was exhibited at Afinsa-Almirante, the blue of Azul (1996). Blinding banana yellows: Fruta española (1997). Citrus yellows: Zumo de limón (2006), nearly two meters high by nearly three meters wide, and a canvas with a presence almost like a set or a theatrical curtain. Reds, sometimes with a hint of Moroccan tapestry and other times with a touch of the iconic Atelier rouge by Matisse, who was also a great lover of Morocco. Deep reds in the cardboard piece titled Brel (1999), a tribute to the Belgian singer from the plat pays, or in the small painting titled Déco (2002). Pinks in Mono (1995) or in a canvas with rose motifs (1998). Splendid greens, almost Amazonian in hue, on so many canvases and sheets of paper… All of them examples of what a masterful colorist the late Giralt became.
The Matisse thread, which I introduced near the beginning of this essay through the reference to the teenage Giralt’s fascination with that issue of *Paris Match* featuring photos of the Vence chapel taken by the photojournalist immortalized by Hergé, strikes me as absolutely essential to understanding that later Giralt, devoted to that “moist lushness of color” appreciated by someone nevertheless prone to tragedy and drawn to darker tones—his friend and former gallery partner Darío Villalba, in a text imbued with loyalty, written for the catalog of his colleague’s exhibition held in 1997 at the Palacio de Revillagigedo in Gijón. In “Matisse Again,” one of the most evocative texts in *Algún día seré recuerdo*, Marcos Giralt Torrente—who has inherited his father’s devotion to the painter who championed the luxury, calm, and voluptuousness extolled by his compatriot Baudelaire (alluded to by our painter in the 2006 canvas *Las flores del mal*)— recalls a visit (he was twelve years old) with his father to a dazzling exhibition of the French artist’s work, held in 1980 at the Juan March Foundation.
A painter in the style of Matisse is one whose paintings, when hung on the wall, invite us to immerse ourselves in them. This is true of this thrilling mature Giralt, but also of the most luminous Rothko (creator, in 1954, of a Homage to Matisse, abstract and sublime as all his paintings were even then); and of a friend of Rothko’s like the Motherwell of the Open series; and of the semi-figurative Diebenkorn of the Californian Ocean Parks (Diebenkorn, who was much talked about at one time in Madrid’s art studios); and of José Guerrero, a friend of Rothko and Motherwell, and a painter also championed today by Cayón, in whose beautiful space both Giralt’s paintings and those of the artist from Granada look so good; and of the Olivier Debré of the immense blue canvases painted on the banks of the Loire River; and the more war-like Miguel Ángel Campano, the artist behind the Vocales; and the British painter Howard Hodgkin, another artist whom Marcos Giralt Torrente owes to his father, who, already seriously ill, visited—accompanied by him—the exhibition curated by Enrique Juncosa, which the Reina Sofía dedicated to him in 2006.
To flee far away. An invitation to travel, to wander. Giralt, who was always a cosmopolitan, excels at this kind of evocation. Train Travel (1992), with its impossible swirls, almost like those of the miniature trains of childhood, and its mountains by the sea, is a canvas that one mentally places near the poems of A. O. Barnabooth and certain American films. Air Liner (1990–1991) constitutes another invitation to travel, more contemporary, more fast-paced. A pretty Art Deco sticker from a prestigious hotel in the Welsh coastal town of Llandudno is the starting point for Imperial Hotel (1991), a cardstock piece owned by the Bank of Spain. Another similar image, also from old tourist propaganda, is the origin of Venice (1999–2001), and from a similar one comes Granada (1894). I really like two other dreamscapes, both nautical and obviously dominated by blue: Acorazado (1991–1992), effectively built around a print of a military vessel, and kiki (2005–2006), featuring several ships. Looking at the gouache series La maison de Mogador (1972), or the silkscreen from the same year, Essaouira, a happy, color photograph comes to mind, taken precisely in 1972 during one of his stays in that Moroccan town. In it, dressed in a green djellaba, he poses alongside Gloria Kirby, a woman who held such affection for that country where she would later pass away (in Tangier), to which Larache (1994) and the card Adiós Med would also later refer.
Switching continents, the yellows and greens of the resplendent Ica-Nazca (1993), another canvas owned by the Bank of Spain, evoke Peru and amount to an incursion into that pre-Hispanic sensibility that proved so fruitful throughout the last century, from Torres-García to Helmut Federle, by way of César Paternosto. I would like to know more about the two months in 1991 that Giralt spent there, during which he also visited Cuzco and Machu Picchu. In 2000, there is an Eisenstein-like Viva México, which starts from a beautiful tequila advertisement featuring a guitar, cactus, and sarape. One of the two canvases I acquired in 2001 for the Reina Sofía, South Seas, from that same year, bears a title somewhere between Stevenson and Gauguin, two of the great definers—one with words, the other with brushes—of Oceania; but for those of us who were children in the 1950s and ’60s, it also brings to mind a marvelous film from the short-lived Cinerama, dating from 1958.
Lamu-Barbate was the title, in 2006, of his last solo exhibition at Machón, and that title, like those of canvases such as Barbate Blues (2004), to which I will return shortly, or Zahara (1989), leads us to his summer home in the town of Barbate in Cádiz, and to the fact that in 2004 and 2006 (in the latter case, accompanied by his son and his son’s wife), Giralt visited his sister Carmen in her final retreat in Lamu, Kenya.
Ica-Nazca. Lamu-Barbate. The importance of words in this painting, just as in Miró’s work of the twenties. Les mots dans la peinture, which Zóbel introduced me to, remains one of the two books by Michel Butor that I like most, just one step below that Train Travel that is La modification. In Blue Note (1993), Giralt pays homage to one of the most famous record labels in the world of jazz, while once again indulging in the pleasure of using one of his favorite colors. That same color is also the main protagonist of the aforementioned Barbate Blues, and of another beautiful evocation, that of The Islands (2002). The somber Kosovo (1999), by contrast, alludes to the bleakest European current events of that moment. Words: at times arranged like hieroglyphs, as in the enigmatic Harp, Comb, Umbrella (1996). Or simply a playfully misspelled title, such as AtarDC (1993).
The practice of collage is absolutely central to Giralt’s working method, and I have always found in his painting a distinctly diary-like quality. He used to fill notebooks with clippings—very much a Colegio Estudio habit (I speak from experience), though it may well have been taught at El Pilar too. A good disciple of Apollinaire in this regard, he believed that one can paint with anything, and so he made a habit of grabbing all sorts of printed matter or objects: some unique, appearing in only a single work, and others of which he owned multiple copies and which therefore recur in several pieces. He loved Schwitters’s Merz universe, a passion he passed on to his son: see, in Tomorrow I Will Be a Memory, his evocative lecture at the Thyssen Museum, “My Life with Kurt Schwitters,” in which he recalls the visit they made together in 1982 to the pioneering retrospective that the Juan March Foundation devoted to the artist from Hanover.
I have already provided a number of references to things we find in his painting. Some are incorporated through the direct method of collage; others are painted, “with nods to trompe l’oeil,” as Francisco Calvo Serraller put it. In list form, and without indicating which painting I am referring to in each case, one can say that many materials found in flea markets, antique shops, estate sales, or simply old-fashioned stores also capture our attention.
By way of a verbal collage, here is a possible list—alphabetical and not intended to be exhaustive—of those materials: embroidery; a poster with Picasso’s famous blue self-portrait; trading cards; children’s handwriting notebooks; drawings of vernacular furniture; technical drawings; lace; food wrappers; prints of wild animals (for example, the giraffe, protagonist of Savanna, 1995, now at the DA2 in Salamanca); religious prints; machinery brochures with photographic illustrations that seem lifted from Picabia; a photograph of a nun named Sister Clara and many other photos of anonymous (and almost fictional-seeming) figures; 1950s fashion photographs (for example, of a model by Jacques Fath); photographs of baby booties or of a Bota nacional (1997), which belongs to the Naturgy Foundation; anatomy plates; letters in lowercase or uppercase (depending on the case) forming words that are often incomplete (for example, in 1997, Untitl); illustrated children’s books; checkered tablecloths; maps; Brossa-like playing cards (as, in some cases, are the letters); pages from gastronomic magazines; pages from what used to be called men’s magazines; Christmas gift wrap; stamped papers; shelf paper like that sometimes used by Alfredo Alcain; sewing patterns; postcards; old magazines (for example, the German Der Satrap); crocheted doilies; various fabrics…
Although some of the items on the list are painted, most are incorporated into the maelstrom of the work as they are, through the process of collage. With his usual perceptiveness, Enrique Andrés Ruiz has aptly described the importance of what we might call our painter’s flea-market impulse: “With a view to achieving that new synthesis he was undoubtedly pursuing, Juan Giralt paid special attention to everything that, like himself, had been discarded. Antique shops, estate sales, the Rastro, what has been cast off by history, what lies outside the bounds of official circulation—this would be a favored territory for the painter, that heap in which everything becomes equal.” Marcos Giralt Torrente, for his part, writes very insightfully about this same impulse, while rejecting the idea that it amounted to collecting: “He liked comfort. He liked comfortable, well-decorated homes, and he liked beautiful things—he liked owning them. He was a fetishist, not a collector; he did not accumulate.”
All collagists are, at heart, flea-market types, ruminators on what is found at the Rastro and at the flea markets of the world, at the Puces or Pulcie, at flea markets everywhere. This is true of André Breton and Mario Praz. Staying within Madrid, it is true of Ramón Gómez de la Serna, a collagist of the printed images that covered the walls and screens of his successive Torreones, and who began collecting masks and fetishes. Or of Ezra Pound, who in that vast poetic collage that is The Cantos incorporates the Madrid of 1909 and, within it, Las Américas, as the lower part of Ribera de Curtidores was then called. The Rastro has also been frequented by Arroyo, the Mexican Alberto Gironella, Millares, Carlos Edmundo de Ory, Carlos Saura and other photographers, Trapiello, José Vázquez Cereijo, and painters of a younger generation, such as Dis Berlin, Damián Flores, or Jorge Galindo. And of course Giralt, whom I ran into so many times on those blessed slopes, which he often roamed, almost always in the company of the rediscovered Joaquín Pacheco, through whom he would connect with two other colleagues, Juan Manuel Díaz-Caneja and Jesús González de la Torre, both of whom also became close friends. At that time, all of them gathered at a tertulia at the Gijón, also attended by several writers, among them Barnatán. (At eighty-nine, Pacheco is today the most senior of these flea-market regulars.)
From the Rastro to the plateau. A cardboard work such as Castilla (1995), whose center is a black-and-white photograph of a farmer plowing, and in which the text we read is the classic “Castile is vast,” and another from 2000 with the same title, in which the phrase is inscribed in the sky, and the canvas titled The Horizon (2001): these three paintings could be read as so many homages to Caneja, with whom their author appears in a color photograph taken in 1984, on the occasion of the elder artist’s retrospective organized by the Ministry at the Pablo Ruiz Picasso Rooms. Along the same lines are the horizon and the ochres and yellows of Villaconejos (1996). Before the cardboard titled Guisando Pedro (1997–1998), we naturally think of the Iberian verracos of that site in Ávila, and we also perceive that, with its ochres and browns, it is a composition nourished by Caneja, by Benjamín Palencia, by Ortega Muñoz: a kind of revisited School of Madrid.
Durante su mencionada travesía del desierto, para completar sus ingresos Giralt había dedicado parte de sus afanes a reformar y decorar casas. Seguro que, como sugiere Marcos Giralt Torrente, en esos trabajos alimenticios se manifestaba el mismo don para buscar combinaciones inesperadas que tenía para componer el nada forzado y muy libre y a la vez muy riguroso puzle de sus cuadros. La temática y el título (tan a lo Gastón y Daniela) de Cretona (1999, propiedad del Ayuntamiento de Pamplona, que lo adquirió en la edición de ese año de su Bienal de Artes Plásticas) y Cretona 2 (1999-2000) parece claro que remite a esa actividad paralela suya. Lo mismo cabe decir ante Costa (1998), el otro lienzo suyo que compré para el Reina Sofía, o ante el mencionado Zumo de limón. Esa invasora obsesión textil llega a su paroxismo en Retrato (2000), con una estructura paradójicamente neoplasticista (Arrieta a Bárbara Mingo Costales: “Mondrian me hace pensar en Giralt”) y con los tres Tartanes escoceses, escalonados entre 2004 y 2006. Obsesión que cabe leer como un nexo más con Matisse. Claro que en Giralt los motivos casi nunca hacen su aparición en solitario, y así, tanto en la primera versión de Cretona como en la segunda, esa tela estampada se entremezcla con uno de esos paisajes mesetarios imaginarios tan aficionados por él por aquellos años. Consciente de lo contradictorios entre sí que eran algunos de los ingredientes de su pintura, así se refería al asunto en uno de sus cuadernos, en 2003: “Procuro encontrar el equilibrio entre un orden muy primario y otros elementos más turbios y emocionales. El resultado es un orden que se sostiene en una geometría engañosa de líneas torcidas”.
Marcos Giralt Torrente, de nuevo, nos ayuda, desde su propia escritura, a entender esa geometría sui generis: “a base de multiplicar los centros, acaba con la noción misma de centro”. Encuentro especialmente significativo en ese sentido el muy construido y a la vez acrobático lienzo titulado Escala de Jacob (1995), con su inconfundible sistema de ventanas, con su gran delicadeza cromática, con sus textos, con su escalera ascendente, con su collage de una fotografía de un elemento mecánico, con su paisaje de llanura con montañas al fondo…
El humor, marca de la casa Giralt. Como lo he indicado, ya en su individual de Vandrés de 1974 Moreno Galván apreciaba esa dimensión de su obra, patente por ejemplo en La Pinocha. Marcos Giralt Torrente anota que le gustaba Jacques Tati, como le gustaba, por cierto, a Brossa. Especialmente gracioso un título de 1994: Cocinillas. De 1997 es Félix el gato. En 2006 homenajea a Winnie de Pooh, el osito de A.A. Milne… y de Walt Disney. El elemento “trouvé”, encontrado, que da título al esplendente Cuadro de ciervos (2002), también con su correspondiente dosis de cretona, es el típico producto de una fábrica de pintura destinada al consumo de la clase baja, lo cual trae a mi recuerdo a un pintor madrileño post-sauresco, Francisco Molina, que en su precaria juventud, antes de convertirse, en su faceta de gestor cultural, en uno de los actores decisivos de la escena cultura sevillana seventies, había llegado a trabajar en una de esas empresas, ubicada en la industriosa Alcoy. Más humor: le perdían los juegos de palabras, por ejemplo Octopozul (1991-1992), el pulpo azul, cuya flotante silueta se adivina, hermana de las que se agitan en Pesca del calamar (1987).
Un pintor que permanece y crece, y que, sin alharacas, con elegancia y con un punto siempre de estar por encima de las malas pasadas del destino, mantuvo un tono muy alto, especialmente en sus últimos años, en que no estaba tan en el centro de la escena como lo había estado antes, pero en que comenzó a encontrar un eco creciente no sólo entre los críticos de las nuevas generaciones, sino también, cosa más interesante, entre colegas más jóvenes. A la ampliación de ese eco han ayudado, cuatro hitos póstumos. En 2015, la retrospectiva del Reina Sofía, co-comisariada por Carmen Giménez y Manuel Borja-Villel, y en cuyo catálogo además de ellos escriben Calvo Serraller y Marcos Giralt Torrente, que incluso firma una muy completa cronología, basándose en un texto inédito de su padre, “Estúpida biografía artística tipo catálogo antológico (para hacerla bien)”. En 2020, la individual en Cayón, titulada La pintura entre extremos. En 2021, otra en Lisboa, Control y fuga, enmarcada en la Mostra Espanha, y que tuvo por marco la Galeria Pintor Fernando de Azevedo de la Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, sala espaciosa, próxima a la Avenida da Liberdade, y cuyo nombre trae a mi memoria la silueta discreta y afectuosa de quien fuera uno de los fundadores del grupo surrealista portugués. Y ahora esta muestra en el MARCO de Vigo, comisariada por su director, el de siempre giraltista Miguel Fernández-Cid, y por Marcos Giralt Torrente, y con mucha novedad respecto de la del Reina Sofía.
Juan Manuel Bonet