SANLEÓN (JOSÉ PÉREZ SANLEÓN)
Catarroja (Spain), 1953 
After training at the Facultad de Bellas Artes de San Carlos in Valencia, during the eighties he adopted an Expressionist aesthetics that operated indiscriminately between figuration –female figures and landscapes- and abstraction. He regularly presented his work at the Galeria Palau in Valencia, where he had his first solo exhibition in 1982. He exhibited abroad for the first time in 1986, with exhibitions in Rome, at the Galleria De Crescenzo, and Paris, at the Galerie Antiope. The series Agujeros negros (Black Holes), 1987-88, began a progressive simplification in which the elements of construction gained importance. These characteristics were already strongly determined in the series that he produced during the transition from the eighties to the nineties, in which he paid tribute to the city of Rome –Roma Quadrata and El laberinto (The Labyrinth), 1990-91- and in which he also heightened the physical nature of the matter of painting and established an interplay of counterpoints between planes. His experience of New York in the early nineties was documented in his series Bocins de Manhattan (Fragments of Manhattan), 1991-93, shown, together with the series produced in the late eighties, at the IVAM’s Centre del Carme in 1993. In these distinctly reductionist paintings there was clearly a conscious use of devices of a Minimal nature, especially the serial structure of the compositions. This tendency, however, was soon left behind, and in the latter part of the nineties, when he turned to tarpaulins as the supports for his painting, he continued with a series of themes of an autobiographical nature, including self-portraits, photographs of his son and cityscapes of places that he had visited, but now represented by means of photographic and silkscreen techniques, combined with the use of collage. In the nineties he developed an incipient activity as a sculptor, and some of the pieces he made were shown, together with his paintings, in 1998 in a retrospective exhibition at L’Almodí, exhibition gallery of the City Council of Valencia.