Juan Béjar Juan Béjar - thomas punzmann gallery

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Juan Béjar versus Juan Béjar.
Miguel Ramos Morente
English translation: Peter J. Field
There are artists who take their inspiration from Art’s
great masters and reproduce their influence. Others,
however, transfer to their creations the impact of experience.
Juan Béjar is closer to those who reveal their I by
baring it than to those who drink from the springs of the
venerated and claim to be their heirs.
His work is founded upon an understanding view of whatever
is occurring and postulates concerns that signal
the presence of an artist who is truthful in all aspects
of life. Juan Béjar inquires in an atmosphere of intimacy
and uncovers his doubts and desires until he generates
a drifting current that bears us into a mysterious, welcoming
and desolate region. Behind the certainties of
appearance there hide other infinitely resonant symbolic,
allegorical and artistic territories.
His paintings are surprising, intriguing, memorable. We
have before us a splendid, overwhelming work. Béjar’s
work is profound, as are Nietzsche’s mysteries. His
personal and creative curriculum is a story of exemplary
commitment to painting and truth.
Infected by the germ of painting, austere, warm, ever
mysterious in his intense fragility, fashioned in a voyage
of emotions and possessed of a maturity fertile in achievements,
Juan Béjar exemplifies the equilibrium of one
who moves amidst languages of profound plasticity. His
work unfolds in the predominance of black and silence,
revealing lingering melancholy and tragic gazes that evidence
a dramatic feeling for the world.
Béjar, with his ever-present anguish, dives into the pain
of painting, the defined pain of living, a fruitful, still pain.
The artist invites us to enter this world of his own situated
between dream and reality and makes the spectator
accustomed to disquiet while sunk in the space that
divides wakefulness from sleep
His figures are touched by the light of a different star,
are the keepers of a secret that is very hard to share. By
the force of sensations they flood our gaze with stimuli
but, all the same, are frightening, intriguing and fascinating.
In his paintings there is a fusion of naïvety, horror
and dazzle.
From these points of reference Béjar reveals the artificiality
of the traditional roles of beauty. He leads us to
reflect upon the fact of seeing and the act of looking,
eye-sight and the gaze as an object. A hazardous balance
between beauty and transcendency, between thought
and emotion.
Béjar makes a refined and harmonious exercise of drawing,
shows a prodigious sense of composition, lavishes
technique and quality in determining with radical precision
the use of impasto and glaze. In his latest work,
exhibited at the Contempo Gallery in Rotterdam, his
new treatment of landscape is surprising. Noteworthy is
its position in the central plane of the board, the surface
of which he subjects to different intensities and layering
of the material, allowing us to glimpse the marvellous
ability that is characteristic of his aesthetic inventions.
The painter is strongly drawn towards the portraits of
deepest Spain left to us by Goya, Solana and Zuloaga
and others of religious and court subjects conceived
by the supreme genius of Velázquez, Zurbarán, Murillo,
Carreño and other Spanish masters. He himself is an
acknowledged exponent of contemporary Spanish figurative
plastic art. He also confesses his admiration for
American Naïve Painting, those 19th-century paintings
of disturbing simplicity. The prodigious force of its painting
irradiates a creative innocence.
Béjar, inspired by Kafka’s fruitful solitude, draws the
syllables of dreams, the vast darkness of anguish, the
stifling stillness of disconsolation. Béjar names the heart
of pain, wandering gardens, irremediable collapse. A
spiral of silence envelopes the broken clouds of dreams
and floods the presentiment of autumn, leaving the town
waves away.
Along the highways of his paintings pass silent anatomies,
versions of a humankind that is distorted or continually
disturbed. Unspeakable characters who survey
the slow limit of their hips, stunned by the extreme whiteness
that bursts from their thighs. Disturbed bosoms
of maidens wrapped in old gold and luminous transparencies.
Immense eyes stuck fast in the trembling of
their disorientation and now denuded of all gazes. Hands
that freeze from absence, red lips that say your name as
they insinuate squalls. Startling prehensile fingers, belts
of light, frozen angles, decomposed jazmines, oranges,
violets, cherries, plant-shoots that spring up in the green
moistness of a head of hair.
The artist bleeds dry in each of his paintings, surrounded
by landscapes broken by the whistling of sadness, birds
that forgot to take to wing, cats trapped in rootlessness,
beribboned grasshoppers, landscapes set far back, bees,
drifting insects, butterflies, asfixiating snakes, blue-dyed
flowers, ribbons, tulle, hoops, diabolos, parts of inhospitable
dead stations, white bootees for feet that will never
tread fresh grass.
The artist has founded a kingdom in a delirium of forms,
inhabited by a chorus of beings Béjar revives in each
painting and envelopes in the rain of bewilderment, a
sweet rain of appearances that does not vitalize the soil