Artist: Victor Jaenada
Exhibition title: Colectiva de mí mismo
Venue: Galería Alegría, Barcelona, Spain
Date: November 13 – December 30, 2021
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Galería Alegría, Barcelona
For Víctor Jaenada (Barcelona, 1977) art is life and life is art. Simple as that. More transhumant than multidisciplinary, Jaenada’s approach to his art is to wander around, to pick things up, to combine techniques, to construct paintings. As a conscious and vocational heir to a kind of flamenco life, his mental nomadism forms a work that multiplies, grows and changes organically. Now, this autumn, it finds refuge and freedom at Galería Alegría.
Víctor Jaenada does not search for, but rather gathers together the pictorial elements, materials and colourful objects with which he constructs his intuitive work, which is hard to explain but immediately enjoyable. It translates the somewhat tragic sense of life onto the canvas, twisting it and making it burn. A painter of the unfathomable, Jaenada composes his work in such a way that it gets under your skin and speaks to you from deep inside – but you are left wondering how exactly he manages to achieve such a striking effect.
Jaenada’s work called for “My Own Collective Exhibition”, consisting of paintings from the last year and a half, which, until now, had not left his studio. “Living things float”, says Jaenada when referring to this exhibition. And he is quite right. This collection of works, almost all of them self-contained in their small and medium-sized formats, multiplies before your very eyes. It is as if the paintings paint themselves, while the artist is carried away by them. This exhibition has the solid lightness of real things, and the paradoxical weight of things that float.
The works in “My Own Collective Exhibition” vindicate that special joie de vivre that comes from living life to the full, with all its light and shade. There is matter and feeling here: canvases darkened by the lighter’s flame, stripped-down strokes, paint that rushes beyond the frame and a fascination with the objects that one finds along the way, be they simple pieces of wood or the autumn leaves that, without fail, always captivate children. We can also glimpse something hieroglyphic, tragic and impenetrable, in compositions that seem to disappear as soon as they are made, as if the painting had wanted to be a song instead.
Víctor Jaenada, like all good flamenco, lives life on the wire – that is, right where these magical, daring paintings come from – and he knows that life lasts but two days. That’s why he paints fast, and lives slow. And this is how he cooks up his labyrinthine, conceptual and intelligent work, of which, today, Galería Alegría is proud to present this collective exhibition of his own. These works depict an all-round artist, ever in search of his place, even though he knows his particular place is neither in time nor in space.
