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The limits in which the work of the Spanish painter José Enguídanos moves are the fascinating limits of an imaginary world. Actually, the only possible geography. From the solidity, from the innocence and debauchery of an indomitable look, the painter drags us in this new exhibition to a space in which surprise, the abundance of lights, transgression, constantly govern, _cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b- 136bad5cf58d_and lucidity. Above all, lucidity. His is a lucid, visionary and wild grammar of emotions and ideas. Before his paintings, instinct, intuition and suspicion are the only weapons of those who look.

 

As in great contemporary art, in his painting Enguídanos questions the origin and limits of pictorial language and the nature of reality. Each of his paintings contains that old dispute: where do they come from, where do the artist's tentacles go, how far are we going to go today. The painter invents a new way of expressing his reality   from a new, radical language, in each work. In this search for expression and the world, Enguídanos breaks the perspectives, breaks the information, breaks the centers. Thus he leaves us naked before the image. In this way, he diverts our attention towards elements that are confusingly marginal, but confusingly nuclear in the life of the painting, that it is alive, that it breathes in front of us, that it is a unique event within a unique universe. In that existential singularity and in that imaginary immediacy, reality is defeated.

 

His work   belongs to the vast domains of dream figuration. A double drive feeds this honeycomb of earthly dreams: the genetic (each painting invents reality, amplifies it, submits it to a different line of force) and the apocalyptic (each painting establishes a definitive order, a final judgment in the marvelous disorder of things). These are the extremes of those who have made their relationship with art a baptism and a petite morte every day. Beyond tendencies or currents, the painter entrusts us with his different and uneven vision. Every day a new world dawns in your hands. Of course, the reality of the painting is no longer real: it is only true, as Antonin Artaud wanted.

 

In Enguídanos's works, an inquisitive cloud always floats in the environment of the painting and we don't know where it comes from: as soon as we feel its weight in the center of us, it causes us a devastating restlessness. The orangutan, the leafy garden, the refrigerator in the corner, the flying whale, Tom Waits as a postmodern pantocrator, the lonely gas station, the trees in a demonic park, the vast snow, the polar bear, keep a secret. That dog, that skeleton of a dog, is uttering his curse through the desert, crawling among the ruins of human civilization and intelligence. Two stuffed animals meet in a forest where only the fringe of light that illuminates them like an impossible spotlight is real  surreal, enigmatic, fairy grove. There is fire on the other side of the jungle, yes, but we don't know why, or on the other side of what, or what is burning, or what is burning.

 

Against a social and artistic system that absorbs individualities, peculiarities and the idiosyncratic, against a system that bets on unique thinking, José Enguídanos arrogantly brandishes his singularity. His imagination is fertile; the lack of limits and common sense (or maybe not?) is his argument.

The work of Enguídanos, with roots that go deep into the 20th century, is also a work of the 21st century. It is in his aspiration of eternal artistic youth, in the vision original with which he illuminates his creations, in the irony and rudeness with which he approaches conventions. With one foot in the romanticism and the other in the irremediable overcoming of the realism (Rembrandt, Caspar David Friedrich, Turner, Balthus, Picasso, Rothko, Enzo Cucchi), what really matters to Enguídanos in painting is light and mystery. , the carefree, perverse and amoral look, the wild and seductive figuration, the surpassed structure and grace in its purest form. Only this depth is painting. Once awake, the painter deeply remembers his dreams. Blue spots in the heights to tell us that this is not real, that everything is a lie. Art is the most necessary and most beautiful lie.