Juan Francisco Casas. The Sexual Night

In Juan Francisco Casas's images, we see flowers, but they are also scenes dominated by red as a common thread and as a symbol of blood, desire, violence, and power. In The Sexual Night, Casas recovers the historical weight of this colour and its association with the carnal and the forbidden. “Red is the first colour in the history of humanity, and its connotations are multiple: sex, beauty, death... I want all of them to appear in one way or another in the viewer's mind,” Casas reveals.

The starting point for The Sexual Night is the eponymous work by Pascal Quignard (Verneuil-sur-Avre, 1948), a key figure in French literary thought who posits a peculiar relationship between image, body, and thought. “In his book, Quignard links the mirror with sex and symmetry with a primal fear. These phrases about symmetry were one of the main triggers for the genesis of the exhibition.” The artist reveals that this book by the French intellectual touched on themes that particularly interested him. “His writing seems hypnotic to me, and for that reason, I haven't tried to illustrate the book but rather to use it as a catalyst.” Casas approaches the images described in the book from a lyrical perspective and explains that “the exhibition is a very free approach to the invisible scenes of the book (Actaeon and Diana in their bath, The Furies, Baubo and Demeter, or Eros and Psyche), not to the images of these paintings but to Quignard's words as interpreted through my images.”

The exhibition also draws on influences from other spheres and periods of art. For example, there are references to the work of the Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch (The Hague, 1664 – Amsterdam, 1750), a virtuoso of technique and symbolism in her depictions of flowers, who became court painter in Düsseldorf. Casas reinterprets her work with a contemporary perspective, moving from the Baroque still life to a sexualized and conceptual one, where the flower ceases to be merely an image and becomes an idea. He also incorporates the kaleidoscopic performance experiences of Rocío Ciarán and her sensual lipsticks that hypnotically permeate the canvases.

Red on Red, the Shape of Desire

For The Sexual Night at the Fernando Pradilla Gallery in Madrid, Casas has conceived an installation-based presentation. “I’ve tried to break down the pictorial space and arrange the paintings so that they aren’t just paintings, but rather an environment. I think that the fact that they are red and monochrome, ambiguous and unsettling, helps in this immersion of the viewer.” Between an immersive installation made with large-format canvases, another made with 200 Polaroids, several individual canvases, and an impressive floral sculpture, The Sexual Night is thus composed of various pictorial installations that occupy the entire gallery space.

The colour red is one of the protagonists of the exhibition. It was one of the first pigments used by humankind to recreate scenes on cave walls, and its resemblance to blood made it essential in rituals. “I don’t usually leave anything unthought. No solution is merely aesthetic, so obviously, in something as present in this project as red, it’s entirely a concept. The reasons for its use are both its historical symbolism and what it suggests psychologically to the viewer,” Casas points out.

Alongside oil paint, the artist incorporates lipstick as a symbol. “The moment you use one material or another, you're giving the work another layer of meaning and politics: red lipstick is part of the cultural history of eroticism, of seduction. Exactly like flowers. Both are understood as feminine based on simplistic cultural parameters. Furthermore, it's obvious that when we paint our lips, the unconscious references to the vulva are clear. In my red flowers painted with lipstick, by transforming them into symmetries, red and carnal, they appear in the same way as giant vulvas.” Expanding on this idea, he clarifies that “flowers are always sexual organs; that is their function, that much is explicit. Let's not forget that they were in the works of Georgia O’Keeffe, Robert Mapplethorpe, Araki, and others. From there, the corporeal, the organic, is a fundamental part of the exhibition: I have always worked from a Baroque vision of art, and on this occasion it is even more evident, but ambiguity always lends a project different interpretations.”

In The Sexual Night, Casas constructs a visual universe where the image becomes a reflection, a duplication, and a wound. It no longer represents but evokes. The artist proposes a contemporary reading of desire as a territory of unsettling symmetries, where the body and its representation multiply and confront their own reflection. This idea particularly interests him because of the disquiet and beauty it generates.

Mythology is also key in this project, but in a subtle, not literal, way. For example, in the diptych Actaeon and Diana, Actaeon is absent, and Diana is covered in a metallic, almost celestial, liquid material that blends with the bathwater. In his text, Quignard, quoting Ovid, recounts how Diana's mount—that is, the stones, plants, and flowers—is filled with Actaeon's blood. Furthermore, Baubo displays her genitals as in mythology, but in this case, they are an enormous flower, which is also a sexual organ. The Furies, which represent all mythological creatures, are a classic Sadean representation using BDSM and latex, brought to life by the performer Rocío Ciarán, with whom Casas has been working for fifteen years.

The hundreds of Polaroids in The Sexual Night, which are highly voyeuristic, erotic, and ambiguous (but not so much explicit), allude to the hundreds of eyes of the giant Argos Panoptes, or, translated, "Argos who sees all," which in this case would be a stand-in for the voyeur-spectator.

"I wanted to do a project with Quignard's book ever since I read it. I established a structure for the work based on specific flashes of phrases from the book. The inspiration might seem indirect, almost tangential, from the outside, but for me the works clearly stem from his book because I created them all with it in mind, and with many of its phrases, which are slow to digest, but which stay with you for days, months. Or forever. Like good art," says Juan Francisco Casas.

About Juan Francisco Casas

“The body is the theme of all the art that interests me: it’s the theme of the Baroque, of Caravaggio, of Michelangelo, of Artemisia, of Pasolini, of Nan Goldin, etc…”.
Juan Francisco Casas (La Carolina, Jaén, 1976) is one of the most recognizable names in Spanish art, having managed to take hyperrealistic drawing into the realm of the conceptual and become an exponent of its renewal. He remains in the public eye for his prodigious use of the ballpoint pen and a certain affinity with photography. In The Sexual Night, however, the main mediums are oil paint and lipstick. Casas explains: “I don’t consider it a change in my work; it’s more of a return. I started out painting. I love painting and its process, so different from drawing, and it’s been like coming home.”

The works in the exhibition appear visually very different from her earlier blue pen portraits, but conceptually they stem from similar ideas, inspirations, and reflections. “Although they are different from my work of a few years ago, if you look at all the chapters of my work, one by one, it all makes perfect sense. For example, the flowers are still Rachel Huysch's, the same ones I used in my last exhibition of drawings at the gallery in 2023. I discovered Huysch while researching Artemisia Gentileschi, who was the subject of my previous project, which in turn was also the subject of the three projects before this one: the Roman Baroque and Pasolini. I see a clear line that runs from the small, symmetrical drawing of Pasolini's dead, red, and bloodied head that I exhibited at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome in 2016 to the enormous red flowers of 2026: a journey once again from Eros to Thanatos.”

Winner of the National End-of-Degree Award from the Ministry of Education for the best university academic record in Spain in 1999, Casas has represented Spain at the Prague Biennale and has received numerous accolades, including a grant from the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, the ABC Painting Prize, and a grant from the Spanish College in Paris.

His work has been exhibited at international institutions such as the Kunsthalle Munich, Kunsthalle Emden, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Cube Museum Seongnam, and the Quebec Museum, as well as key venues in Spain such as ARTIUM Vitoria, DA2 Salamanca, and the Museum of Málaga. His work is found in prominent public and private collections, including the ABC Museum, the Collection of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, and the Tatxo Benet Collection, among others.

“One never stops being oneself, even though one changes over the years. I believe that's true of art as well.” J. F. C.