Guerrero Medina Guerrero Medina

Ever since I began painting – in my childhood – I have always thought that it was a natural way of expressing the world around me, my imaginative games or the mood in a parallel world. Then came the desire to capture reality through painting, as the great artists did, and in order to do that I needed to learn technique and discipline, years of observing and trying to create a link between the information you receive from the gaze and the hand that can transmit it. Once the will of the language is freed up from the technical obstacles then you get closer to the possibility of creating a source that is capable of expressing – expressing itself – the emotions and feelings that the artist accumulates throughout their life, but in order to achieve this they have to master the tools that each one needs to express in their own language. When this happens, there are those who acquire the commitment to express themselves on their own ground and, although they are no stranger to the trends and fashion of the time, they prefer to follow the path that their own inertia dictates.

The exhibition begins with a selection of works from the first period and some from the “Procesión de los Cretinos” (Procession of the Cretins) series, in the mid-seventies, hence the use of the quote by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. As well as the series “Silla de la Muerte” (Garrote chair) about Salvador Puig Antich, from 1974, and Paredón y fusilamiento (Firing squad wall and execution), from 1975.

In our artist’s work, post 1970, expressionist interpretation has been prominent, understood in the sense that we do not need to base art in the real world – from the social, according to the new figuration – but, rather, in art itself. Art is reinforced by its own strength and this is rooted in the inescapable expressiveness of colour, its subjective symbolism whose origin stems from the fact that ‘the inner being of the object permeates the form’; so the form, colour and object are only perceptible by the form, that is, in painting, by the colour.

For Guerrero Medina, the human is not the form that he was taught to define, by means of the line or measurements, but instead a composition of chromatic violence, a grotesque reflection of the violence that life subjects it to. The human being is not an idealized figure, rather a magma of colour, because Guerrero Medina is a painter who expresses the passion which animates him.

In this gallery of scrawny humans, the being represented is responsible for its updated presence. Guerrero Medina does not feel any mercy for the human; he feels it is a passive plaything of its surroundings, useless passion, manipulator manipulated by its own luck.

Our artist converts Nature into Art. And out there he attacks and speaks, out there he defines. With unconventional definitions, uncodified. With artistic definitions. For him art is his Action. Action that he has found along the path, from a consideration of what art should be.

Guerrero Medina at a time for dreaming, silence and footsteps in the air, has allowed his personal world – and also one that his cunning eyes see – to be represented, described under the graphics of the dotted lines, the marks… and in this dead of night a new singular character is being born – putrid? – that represents the society in which the creator lives.

The sublime characters of Guerrero Medina – sometimes alone, with a wall in the background, indescribable; or sitting in a chair, tilting their heads in anguish; or with an ever-grey sky, dirty; at other times these characters emerge in his paintings in multitude, destroyed, denuded – march shouting and excited at dusk, in flesh and blood.

Sometimes, it is the human in the landscape; at other times, it is the human in front of the landscape; sometimes it is the human with their impediments or useful objects; at other times, it is an amorphous mass simply present and directly unexpressed. For his own orientation, and maybe with a desire for a classification and organization of the production, he defines these artistic proposals as series: volatile series, tie series etc.

Turning this on its head would mean that Guerrero Medina, at a certain point in his creative process, would have discovered another meaning in the plastic art theme and the relationship between theme and plastic art: that the theme would be a plastic art subject and not the other way round; in other words, that plastic art would already contain the theme. For the artist this would translate in the following way: the artist lives reality, is present in it, and is slapped, pushed, and plunged into it. They have to have an approach to it: an artist’s approach. Therefore, their answer is to create art and, thus, it is art that expresses reality to us without the social conventional codes through which society has established that reality should be formalized.

There are also exhibits of some paintings dedicated to the “Retratos de Soledades” (Portraits of solitudes) – including Retrato de mi Padre (Portrait of my Father), painted during a long stay in Jaén in 1978 – which were incorporated into the series “Aceituneros” (Olive pickers).

On 8th February 1939, the fall of Figueres to Francoist rebels ended a cycle of almost three years of fighting and resistance against fascism. The Spanish Civil War reached culminated in Catalonia. This led, only two days later, to one of the largest exoduses of refugees of the twentieth century. Nearly half a million people – the bulk of the Popular Army in Catalonia, along with children, women and the elderly – crossed the Spanish–French border at its easternmost strip: from the Cerdanya (high up in the Pyrenees mountains) to the last foothills of the maritime Albera (on the Mediterranean coast).Freedom had been crushed and a long painful exile began.

Guerrero went through a time of decompression from so much immersion in nature, which he dedicated to painting portraits of people he knew, painting for himself, not for commissions, as a process of returning to the human as matter.

Then, with his retina full of the colours gained from his landscape stage and with the recovery of the human as matter, he looked inwards in his memory where he found themes, gestualities that he has described without the slightest intention to describe something exemplary.

Rather, we are faced with a use of situational memory, not nostalgic memory or memory as story. Looking at nostalgic memory is often evocative of a situation we have stored that reminds us of a current mood.

But if we contemplate the result of that immersion, we discover that together with the realization of the challenge of painting what the memory offers up, the viewer receives a very literary impact. For Guerrero the result has almost always been couples between two unknown situations, expecting, before or after a battle – whichever battle that is, it is not important. It is as if the painter had wanted to express what is left for us from the others and there they are, calm, without looking at each other, hardly touching each other, each one coming from where they come from and going to their own place; something has happened, or could happen, ending a story or beginning one. They are the others, not thought of as a hell or in their hell, but as a simple verification.

This situation is stored within a memory story: this novel of our lives which we have basically told ourselves, although at times with the help of others. It is not about trying to enter into this storytelling of life, but to capture, by means of the technical skill of the painter, figures and situations that are arbitrarily recalled and offered by a strictly situational memory.

The main characters in the painting, the Infanta Margaret Theresa and her entourage, the painter and the canvas – which becomes key to understanding the painter’s intentions – would appear to have been placed there to capture the viewer’s attention and draw them into the representation. Thus, the famous phrase the old master Pacheco said to the young Velázquez during his training – ‘the image must come out of the picture’ – takes on a particular relevance. When we view the collection of previously unexhibited portraits which make up the ‘Velázquez’ series by Guerrero Medina, we soon become aware of the predominance of the characters in them. The master Pacheco, the Infanta Margaret or the painter, to name just a few, appear to escape from the role the Sevillian painter had assigned them more than three hundred years ago. The physiognomy identifies them, and at the same time, there is something in their faces and eyes that makes them eternal and enigmatic to us.