JUAN GENOVÉS
Valencia, (Spain) 1930 - Madrid (Spain) 2020

As a young man he helped his father, a craftsman, painter and furniture decorator, and thus became familiar with the techniques of art. Subsequently he also took drawing classes with a teacher before starting to study at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Carlos in Valencia. He and various friends at San Carlos founded the group Los Siete in 1950. The following year he took part in the first Bienal Hispanoamericana de Arte and went to live in Madrid, where he mixed with groups of young painters. In 1955 he visited Paris for the first time, and in 1957 his first solo exhibition was presented in Madrid, at the Sala Alfil. This was followed by participation in group exhibitions at Neblí and Darro and a second exhibition at the Ateneo in 1960. The following year he was a co-founder –together with José Jardiel, Fernando Mignoni and Gastón Orellana- of the Grupo Hondo, adopting the postulates of an aesthetics distanced from Informalism and in favour of the New Figuration. The breaking up of the group in 1963 led him to abandon painting for a year. In 1965 he went back to painting, influenced by what was known as “political realism”, promoted by Peter Sager. That year he presented a solo exhibition at the National Library. The following year he signed an exclusive contract with the Marlborough Gallery. In those years he also took part in numerous international exhibitions. During the sixties and the seventies he produced the works that defined his style, a figuration that moved away from the indifference and irony of Pop Art and dealt with a range of themes that converted his images into icons of denunciation of totalitarian régimes and police violence, taking the specific context of the Franco dictatorship as his starting-point. His work was characterised formally by the appearance of anonymous masses, framed in visual devices taken from the mass media (serial production, fixed photo, parallel arrangements), which provided the possibility of highly effective communication and expressive intensity without forgoing critical reflection. His black and white images were also characterised by a personal representation of space that reinforced the effect of fear, flight and isolation. After a short period spent in London, in 1973-74, he returned to Spain. After the death of Franco he made various series in a realist style, showing the everyday experience of the political transition. He also frequently worked with left-wing parties. During the eighties, when he was awarded the National Visual Arts Prize (1984), he extended the colour range of his compositions, in many cases using metallic hues, and broadening his iconographic range to include the representation of urban landscape, which he showed as empty, with what had formerly been areas of fear transformed into areas of solitariness. In recent years there has been a reappearance of lost, dissociated figures seen from above. Juan Genoves Candel died on May 15, 2020, in Madrid.