PAINTING
Juan AYESTA's artwork is a continuous plastic experimentation, where the materiality is a recurring element of his pictorial career. With special attention to composition, color and textures as basic elements in his way of expressing his concerns. Always attentive to current events, among its main stimuli are those related to the deterioration of the environment, pollution, natural disasters and those caused by man. Topics that provoke and stimulate him to create his pieces.
Another characteristic of his plastic repertoire, from a very young age, has been the fondness for encounterism, the recovery-reuse of poor, abandoned or obsolete objects. He is also stimulated by other elements – tangible and intangible – such as metaphors, signs, meanings, chance, reflection on space and time, the ephemeral, defects, vacuum, presences and absences.
WORKS
ORTHOGONAL STRUCTURES
Around 2019, I felt the need to work on structures through vertical and horizontal strokes and movements. Hence the predominant orthogonal character in the compositions. This series of works are purely abstract, without any reference to tangible aspects (except for implicit allusions in the titles), on different supports: fabrics, papers and various boards.
Coinciding with the pandemic confinement (covid-19) I tried using a pasty black ink, used in offset printing, which allowed me to discover other qualities and new textures working with black on a laminated, low-absorbent white support. And in other works I made them on absorbent paper-pulp, obtained from the paper industry. After confinement, now in 2022, I recovered the use of color and subtly the assembly of various materials.
GASTRO-PAINTINGS
I always had problems with small formats for paintings... until in 2016-17, I thought about the typical pintxos of Basque gastronomy (means "large cuisine in a small format"). So I started working in a different way: I arranged a few small canvases on a work counter-table and began to distribute the colors and various materials as if I were “plating”, looking for other compositions, experimenting with new visual stimuli. Then I used my ironic vein in the titles that emerged, as an additional compositional resource, linking word and image to suggest or provoke...
NATURE & MATTER
Since the mid-eighties, my main stimuli for the execution of paintings have revolved around plastic experimentation based on composition, color and material/texture. In the mid-eighties I discovered the expressive power of the materials I found. Simultaneously my thematic motivations are directed towards the destructive power of nature and also the environmental disasters caused by man.
This block includes a small selection of works from this period, undoubtedly the most extensive and recurrent of my pictorial activity for more than two decades, always based on the search and plastic experimentation with new resources.
EARLY ACRYLICS
This brief selection of works attests to my beginnings (late seventies), with works already mature in composition and color, as well as a mastery of the pictorial medium. They also testify to my early concern for the search for new modes of expression. They are works made with acrylic paints on tablex board, which correspond chronologically to the years of learning under the influence, closeness and friendship of the franciscan painter Álvarez de Eulate. To highlight the Olite series, very personal, with a search for a curved space based on the representation of interior architecture scenes and the domain of color.
