JUAN FRANCISCO CASAS

Galeria Fernando Pradilla presents Juan Francisco Casas’ seventh solo exhibition titled Non Piangere. It is a show inspired by the Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi in which the iconic works of this artist serve as a pretext for Casas to develop his characteristic iconography around the female body and its nature. The body as a place for political and social reflection confronts the viewer with their own thinking. How do we see ourselves? How do we see each other? What ideas do we have about ourselves as an individual and as a social body? Casas very aptly refers to Clarice Lispector’s The Greatest experience in which the Brazilian author writes “I should have liked to be other people first in order to know what I was not. Then I realised I had already been those others and found it easy. My greatest experience would be to be the other of the others: and the other of the others was me.”

Casas’ work is propelled by vital impulses, from his time as an intern at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome (2007-2008), the artist comes into contact with Gentileschi’s work and is fascinated by her mastery and her life as a woman painter among male artists. The biographical book about her, written by Anna Banti in 1947, “a novel that arises from the destruction of a manuscript when the Germans, in their flight from Florence, leaving a trail of destruction” (Fernando Castro Florez), is one of the pillars on which Casas builds the narrative of this exhibition. The artist’s travel notebook written during his trips through Italy and England to study Artemisia’s works in private collections, is another one of them and becomes the beautiful visual poem that is part of the catalogue edited for this occasion. “It is an exhibition that goes from the biographical to the autobiographical, about that specular and reciprocal game always present in my work and also in the works of Artemisia Gentileschi and Anna Banti. In these works I speak of how art transforms life, and vice versa, of life itself reflecting in art ... Thus, all works reflect in different ways on the duality of the voice, on the authorship of works that form part of a life, about the past and the present, and about the feminine in their different realities, representations and perspectives ... In this way, all the women represented in the exhibition are professionals in the field of art: artists, gallery owners, collectors, art historians, writers, art critics, architects, dancers and actresses ... women who are represented as they have decided, without hiding themselves, without censorship.” J.F.C.

The exhibition has around thirty pieces between large and small format paper works, canvases and, for the first time, three sculptures in marble and resin.

The exhibition Non piangere can be seen at the gallery Monday to Friday from 11am to 8pm following the current regulations.