JOSÉ MARÍA BAEZ DONATION

Dates: September 18 - November 8, 2015
Space: Royal Pabillion

The work of José María Baez (b. Jerez de la Frontera, 1949, lives in Córdoba since the 1960s) exemplifies the pictorial trend of figurative expressionism that characterized the 1980s and was embraced by many other young Andalusian artists. Manolete yacente (Manolete Recumbent, 1985), a piece in the CAAC Collection, and several of the donated works date from this period. In Under the Umbrella (Margaret Thatcher) from 1983 and La noche la noche la noche (R. Reagan) (The night the night the night [R. Reagan]) from 1984, he depicted two of the most iconic political figures from that era of conservatism: Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Two other large-format pieces portray character types that represent with stereotypical conceptions of Andalusian culture, the bullfighter and the gypsy woman: Torero (Paquirri) (Bullfighter [Paquirri]) and Ella (Her), both from 1984.

In the mid-1980s Baez began to incorporate classic graphic design into his works, as illustrated by several pieces in the donated lot. This remained a constant feature of his oeuvre until 2009, when he began to use shorter but more elongated formats with increasing frequency: the written line dictated form, adding a layer of inexplicit yet highly significant meaning. The importance of these creations in Baez's corpus is related to the early days of his career, for he started out as a poet. Writing and lines are therefore closely linked to one of the most relevant periods in his professional life.

In the late 1980s and early 90s, his work began to display a noticeable absence of colour and more muted references to death and AIDS, a disease that ravaged several of the artist's friends and was also related to larger issues of social exclusion and discrimination.

In Baez's words, "In my choice of texts, I sought to avoid the descriptive and explicit, instead charging them with metaphorical significance and a high-voltage shock of mystery. I wanted them to tie in with the specificity of painting, with the obscure mechanisms that activate its contemplation, with painting's special ability to defuse time."