It would not be therefore, of a dehumanized complacency in the reflection of monstrous human beings, but rather a reconstruction of the humanity that takes the excessive into account. Neither utopian nor apocalyptic, rather a moving testimony to the screams, to the cold in all its forms and to pain as a denunciation of the fundamental failure of the body and soul. From the violent “cretins” of the seventies to the figurative and chromatic ghosts of his memory at the start of the twenty-first century, forty years to contemplate and the same applies to the painting and sculpture by Guerrero, both of them humanists because they both realize that if man is the most excessive creature ever known, so excessive that, as Chumy Chúmez said in a timely correction of the claims of classical humanism, “Man is the measure of all things”.
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Guerrero Medina, Marc Editor, El Vendrell, 2004.
Fundació Vila Casas presents a great exhibition, entitled El meu compromís (My commitment), about Guerrero Medina (Jaén, 1942), one of the main representatives of Spanish expressionist figuration in the second half of the twentieth century. He creates artwork which, aside from its recurring and interwoven themes, stands as a solid artistic response to the stimuli that obsessively nourishes him.
The exhibition about Guerrero Medina unfolds like a kaleidoscopic vision, focused on the figure and expressed around four thematic axes: alternating social and political messages, from ‘La procesión de los necios’ (The procession of the fools) to the series ‘Los cretinos’ (The cretins); exile, as an ever-present distinctive trait of the human condition, with the background of the Civil War and the Retreat; memory, as an incessant introspective dialogue with its ‘silent tenants’, as Vázquez Montalbán once said; and Velázquez’s artwork, as a source for study and unceasing learning.
It is an artistic imaginary that confronts us as much with the social and political dimension as with the existential and symbolic of human beings, which is always the epicentre of their existence. Man and woman as a ‘worked passion, not as an ideal presence’, in the words of Arnau Puig. It is a work that exudes like no other a strong commitment to life, the world, memory, history, tradition, trade, but above all, to Art: and from here it extracts the magnetic energy that permeates throughout this exhibition.