Arte y Naturaleza, Madrid, Spain

Juan Vida Biography

He began drawing from an early age and his precocious attitude made him celebrate his first show at thirteen in the Centro Artistico y Literario de Granada, with work that presented a social realism. In his home town he frequented the intelectual circles, such as Cafe Suizo, relating to local artists and writers, specially with his writer friend Antonio Muñoz Molina.

In the early eighties, we produced some abstract work, following the lead of Jose Guerrero, who was then a reference to the avant garde in Granada. He then met the work of the american abstract expresionists and began to investigate with the stain and the gestures and purity of the paintings.

In 1983, he came back to realism and his interest in drawing with the series "Ire a Santiago", inspired by the poem called "Son de Cuba", that closes Poeta en Nueva York. From that moment he began to combine the gestures of the painting and color, with drawing and lines, mixing two opposite sides of art making. The figures are placed above liquid-colored backgrounds, making the concrete float on top of the density of the abstract, with its own presence as the only reference to reality.

With the years, his work has become sombre and melancholic. His palette is now more on the side of the ocres, greys, pales, yellows and blues, with which he creates scenes that fluctuate between the oneiric and the immediate reality. The drawing were slowly replaced by photography, converting his pieces in collages where isolated elements are placed in desolated landscapes, creating images with an unsettling in which modern life is presented in a fragmented way.