Etching, aquatint and drypoint on BFK Rives paper.
Striking etching by Juan Barjola, signed in the lower right corner and numbered on the left (49/99). Under the title "Tauromaquia: caída y cogida" it represents a bullfighting scene full of drama. The series to which it belongs is characterized by depicting scenes of constant struggle. In it, the characters in the bullring are dramatically intermingled with those in the arena: spectators, picadors, bullfighters and bulls. Within bullfighting, the theme most widely represented by the author was precisely the moment of the horse's participation, with a fatal outcome for the latter. A triumphal moment is never represented.
As Antonio Gamoneda describes in his work Barjola, tauromaquia y destino: "I believe that always, the horse has the role of a victim who has been victimized, veiled and dragged to death by an action to which it is alien, an action in which the horse is the "innocent". That is why there is always a gesture of supreme pain, of protest, of supplication in the emergence of its head, in the horrible twitching of its teeth. If there is pity in Barjola's paintings (which there is, I am sure), its representation is entrusted to those horse heads in their unbearable, clamorous expression."
In general, Barjola's work is deeply marked by the warlike atmosphere of the time he lived in, but it stands out in a special way in the series of engravings of the Tauromaquia, directly inspired by the tensions and traumas suffered during the Spanish Civil War and by Rafael Alberti's verses on this subject. They are also often related to "Guernica" (1937), for the immortalized representation of the horrors of war and, in this particular case, for the horse's head as a symbol of pain and suffering.
An author of great personality, he uses the expressionist style. Reality is deformed in order to be expressed in a much more subjective way, showing feelings and emotions under a filter of pessimism. Dark, sordid themes are chosen, a degraded world, full of loneliness, misery, anguish, violence and death, all this by means of fast, loose and expressive brushstrokes and a clear rejection of mimesis, all this as a reflection of the existentialist bitterness and the tragic vision of the human being and of life.
Juan Barjola (1919-2004)
Born in Extremadura, Juan Barjola was an internationally recognized author, whose work oscillates between abstraction and a very personal expressionism. He trained at the School of Arts and Crafts of Badajoz, the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando and the School of Arts and Crafts of Madrid. Thanks to a scholarship from the Juan March Foundation, he traveled to Paris and Belgium, where he continued his apprenticeship.
Among the numerous awards he received, the Medal of Extremadura, in 1991, the Eugenio d'Ors Gold Medal, in 1963, and the National Plastic Arts Award, in 1988, stand out.
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