70 x 83 cm framed

50/50
Galería Juana Mordó, Madrid [edition]
Dimitri Papagueorguiu, Madrid [workshop]

Artwork included in the artist’s book Six lithographs, composed of six prints and a text written ad hoc* by Jorge Guillén.

JOSÉ GUERRERO

The poet, from Granada, went to New York and was painfully confronted by the great city, which he felt was inhuman. From that clash would emerge, splendidly, “Poet in New York.” Like Federico García Lorca, José Guerrero, from Granada, went there to find himself, and by struggling with the monster, he became precisely José Guerrero, an admirable Painter in New York. At the beginning of this century, Spanish artists in search of a foreign land chose Paris. New York was later, and is today, a more difficult goal to reach. One must be braver than El Cid to settle in that maelstrom, amidst such confusing circumstances and contradictory temptations, and to paint through that perpetual crisis in which the art of these last decades has been grappling, locked in a fierce struggle between figuration and abstraction. That brave, fortunate man is José Guerrero —who, moreover, did not lose his roots or memory, and continues to paint in Madrid, in his native Andalusia, as if next to his house in Nerja he dreamed of “the kingdom of the ear of corn” that the Granadan poet of New York announces.

Jorge Guillén

This lithograph focuses on the theme of the gap, which he would develop in the oil paintings CR 437, CR 927 and CR 1319.