Juan Soriano. Retrospective 1937-1997

With over one hundred pieces, this exhibition offers a journey through Soriano’s sixty-year history. His beginnings in figuration and imaginary realism lead to an attempt at abstraction dominated by a vibrant palette, which can be seen in pieces such as El pez luminoso (1957) or Viaje a Creta (1958). A second long stay in Italy begins in 1969 and the decision to settle in Paris (1975) results in the recovery of a serene exercise in painting and a return to figuration supported by drawing. To this, allusions to popular culture and dreamed up figurations transformed into pictorial images are added, and we have such pieces as Esqueleto con flores (1978) or La muerte enjaulada (1983).

Without participating directly in the critical currents that break onto Europe and the United States scenes in the middle decades of the century, Soriano continues producing paintings that are marked by Mexican sensitivity. In addition, the artist shows a certain classical enthusiasm which is confirmed by the practice of tempera, as shown in Recreo de Arcángeles (1943), by compositions that refer to, in concept and resources, Italian Renaissance painting, like in El jardín misterioso (1942); and by a definite volumetric consciousness, as in the case of La negra de Alvarado (1944). Thanks to his skills as a portrait artist, he pushes visual and psychological investigations of the "I" and the "other" to the limits in works such as Retrato de Diego Mesa (1941), Retrato de Lupe Martín (1945), Retrato de Lola Álvarez Bravo (1945). This is not an obstacle to creating a symbolic portrait, like in Retrato de una filósofa (María Zambrano) (1955) or exploring the infinite variety of human features, like in the series of Lupe Martín portraits in the Sixties.

Besides portrait, his painting is primarily concerned with three themes: mythology, childhood scenes, everyday matters and dead nature. The exhibition includes a considerable selection of drawings and a set of sculptures, with which the artist manifests suggestions of the three dimensions present from his early paintings. In them he develops different languages: abstract, biomorphic, figurative, he visualises shapes and gives them a strong monumental character.