My painting is the future that plays with the past and stops in the present.
It’s very hard for an artist to explain his work, because in current day painting, particularly mine, I like to give only certain keys when I’m creating it. Later, the audience will have the last word. The painting is a stage behind a door which invites whoever is looking at it to step inside.
A painter from Malaga whose work is defined as conceptual symbolism. His enigmatic figures with beautiful heads, arrogant bodies and animals that transport us to other worlds full of fantasy. Using an elaborate technique, he masterfully uses oil paint, transparencies and colour to express feelings with great irony.
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Juan BéjarBreve PausaOil on canvas46 x 38 cmView more details -
Juan BéjarDos puntos rojosOil on canvas46 x 38 cmView more details
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Juan BéjarLa mascotaOil on canvas46 x 38 cmView more details
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Juan BéjarLa nocheOil on canvas100 x 81 cmView more details
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Juan BejarPasatiempoOil on wood100 x 81 cmView more details
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Juan BéjarSurpriseOil on canvas100 x 81 cmView more details
One of the most outstanding and singular painters of the generation that burst onto the scene in the early seventies defending figuration. Since then he has never ceased to explore, with unfathomable talent, the complexity of the figure as an aesthetic emotion.
A founding member of the Colectivo Palmo, a real driving force of modernity and avant-garde in Malaga in the eighties, he is possibly the only member of a Royal Academy - in this case the San Telmo Fine Arts Academy - who has renounced such an investiture.
An extensive catalogue of solo and group exhibitions, held in Spain and abroad (Pamplona, Malaga, Madrid, Barcelona, Gijón, Santander, Dresden, El Salvador...) explain his long artistic career and the solidity of his work, which is represented in important public and private collections: Varez-Fisa Collection (Madrid), Helmut Brenske (Hannover), Duquesa de Alba, (Madrid), Pablo Ruiz Picasso Foundation (Málaga), Museum of Fine Arts (Málaga), Museum of Modern Art, (San Salvador), Pamplona, etc.
Juan Béjar's work, far removed from the effects of fashion, is based on a solid mastery of composition, drawing and matter. His painting is the antithesis of arbitrariness and unreason, an exercise in originality and creative energy. The characters that inhabit it evoke, with poetic and mournful expression, a reality to which they refuse to pay obeisance. It is as if the artist were trying, in the manner of Proust, to rediscover something lost, a new view of the world, a metaphorical image of dreams, the value of the instinctive and inapprehensible, the communication of the senses.
In Juan Béjar's painting, as in De Chirico's old stations, the desire to flee and the anguish of departure, the calm and the disturbance, the tear and the irony coexist, wrapped in an indefinable atmosphere, a universe of connotations, voices and registers.
(Miguel Ramos Morente, Culture Manager and art critic)
