Galería Tomás March is presenting a group show featuring work by the artists Juan del Junco, Miki Leal, Javier Martín, Cristóbal Quintero and J. M. Pereñíguez.

The shadowless hour is basically noon. Dawn is long gone, and the hopes of the morning when everything seemed possible have vanished with the dew. Now is when time takes on a certain gravity for the first time, as the rays of the sun fall parallel to the axis of the earth and everything is revealed. Yet it only lasts a fleeting moment, which our imagination takes pleasure in prolonging to convince us that it ought to last forever. But it is nothing more than an illusion, at best a beautiful dream, the philosopher’s “round and mature” world. At this juncture of the day and at this time of year, the truly sensible thing to do is look for shelter.

Juan del Junco’s photos address a wide thematic repertoire ranging from sociological commentary to an exploration of his own biography. He has recently developed a growing interest in examining the relationship between art and science and their respective methods and systems of representation, perhaps rooted in his early enthusiasm for ornithology. From a neutral, factual register of reality to the theatrical composition of poses and attitudes, the recourses adopted by the language of photography are critically laid bare in his images and, in confronting them, he reveals a shadow of irony hovering over its mooted values of authority and truthfulness. From a playful and poetic stance, del Junco evolves towards a more neutral and analytic register, encouraged by the example of those pioneering naturalists he admires so much as he begins to detect the possibility of blurring the divide between two ways of seeing and understanding the world and conflating them in one single narrative.

The work of Miki Leal seems to be guided by an infallible, spot-on instinct. An avid consumer, reader and provider of images, Leal unashamedly borrows those that best suit his own particular world, whether these are to be found just around the corner or at the ends of the earth. His painting on paper, becoming more refined and personal as the artist discovers his power, absorb his tastes, his influences, his personal and vital choices, his journeys and then uses them to comprise a kind of painted diary full of memorable annotations in which the banal is ennobled and the sublime is contemplated with veiled and ironic fascination. The absolute naturalness and blatant cheek with which Leal’s painterly work and way of life illuminate, recognise and spur on each other in a joyful, almost demonic interplay, capture the attention and cast a spell over even the most informed beholder.

Underlying Javier Martín’s creative attitude are notable hermetic features. Neither framed views or inward visions, his paintings are more prototypes or devices that exist solely on some missing plane between nature and artifice, between biographic and the purely pictorial. The relations and tensions established between the often recurrent motives populating these paintings are regulated in a private mechanics by an idea of necessity that goes beyond any mere rhetoric of the composition. In this way, Martín advocates a resolution for the dilemma between abstraction and representation in a personal fashion: through an ingenious apprehension of technical and magical aspects that are taken as guidelines in an ordered chaos, ready to explode in full colour in front of the detached, distant gaze.

In his work Cristóbal Quintero manifests a vision of reality charged with lucidity, ingeniousness and compassion, further enriched by his knowledgeable grasp of the history of art and contemporary visual culture. His painting regularly reflects ordinary, everyday aspects of life and human behaviour: leisure and entertainment, interpersonal and social relationships, dreams, obsessions and more or less confessable desires. From this material and using increasingly more singular and rarefied pictorial recourses, Quintero manages to compose a hallucinatory and fun tapestry threaded with multiple references, ranging from the recreation of timeless myths to the imaginary passed down from satire or the archetypes of psychoanalysis, not overlooking the conventions of traditional pictorial genres, all woven together on a framework with disarming frankness and visual instrumentality.

J. M. Pereñíguez’s drawings are almost like a sotto voce commentary on various aspects underpinning his routine in the studio. Grounded in real models and compositions, Pereñíguez wants to create paradox and perplexity, not simply as possibilities of the play of representation but more so as effective qualities pertaining to objects and forms. At once, he expands the concept of drawing towards the written narrative and towards sculpture. In fact, before seeing the cardboard which is their ultimate support, these works are drawn as words or with materials in such a way that some of them never even get beyond this phase. The almost testimonial—yet nevertheless necessary given that it is the sole witness—value of the resulting drawing with respect to the whole private process is sublimated in moral or visual subtleties that question the way of depicting and in obsessive forms of execution, skilfully dissimulated by the apparent laconism of the proposal.

Jesús Reina, exhibition curator