Artworks by Jesús Gómez

I want to push my artwork into another country in the same way that my paintings depict the places and scenes of my travels around the world. I try to make my paintings show through light and color the beauty of those places according to my perception.

The theme of most of the works focuses on places in Spain and the rest of the world. For me, living, traveling and painting are three facets of a single subjective experience that is at the very origin of the conception of my painting.

 It is a different way of understanding the trip, of rescuing it as a mere tourist consumerism in which the most typical or picturesque places are always shown. Even in those places I always try to look, armed with my digital camera, for an unusual angle, a different perspective, a peculiar light, a look... something that escapes the usual vision of the postcards and calendars that reproduce, yes, but do not reinterpret reality raising it to an artistic dimension.

 Then, on my return from the trip, I begin the process, so rewarding and satisfying for me, of capturing on the canvas the places I have visited starting from the photographic image, yes, but above all from my subjective interpretation of that image.

 And always, the light. That light that, together with color, presides over all my exhibitions, from the title to the smallest nook and cranny of the canvases.

 Light as an essential element, necessary in its nuances and in the color that it determines according to the time of day, the season of the year and, above all, the city or place of the pictorial theme.

 It is that luminous gray light of Paris, accentuated in May and softer in autumn. The unparalleled sienna of the October sunsets in Florence. It is the timid turquoise blue light of the Nordic countries, which is filled with cobalt arrogance in the immense Russia. Or the incomparable luminosity – perhaps because it is ours – of that cadmium yellow, like gold, that I have only seen in the Decembers of Murcia.

 That light, which is never the same, that seems to float on the London Bridge, that slides through the Venetian canals, rests in the placid waters of a Caribbean marina and crashes into the rotundity of the colors of Caminito Street, in the Boca de Buenos Aires.

the bluish light with manganese with hard shades of metal that envelops the buildings in New York as they seek verticality in their flight into the sky.

 Four different and complementary lines at the same time, four styles run through the paintings of the exhibition and constitute their framework and their essence.

 Perhaps the one that most characterizes my work is the one that a critic described as the one with broken lines. In it, rigorously respecting the perspective of what are usually almost always urban landscapes, I deconstruct, as Jacques Derrida did with language, the verticality of lines as disparate as a skyscraper, light poles, a palm tree, the columns of the Greek Acropolis or the building that houses the television studios of Sanghai. I assign impossible angles, both in the curves and on the straights, and I accentuate, emphasizing them, the colors that have attracted me, as a way of involving the viewer in his chromatic claim.

 Another of the styles on which my work is based is realism, sometimes taken to its highest degree of expression, in which light takes on a maximum role.

 Linking these two styles, the realistic and that of the broken lines, I usually use the same pictorial theme in two canvases with each of these approaches and the same nexus, which can be the city, the angle or the size, seen from those perspectives, which constitutes, in my opinion, a very interesting unfolding of the original theme, in which the viewer compares both visions that, in some way, enrich and enhance reality, making each one stay with the one he prefers.

 A third style with which I titled one of my exhibitions, On Lines and Color, depicts three-dimensional forms, which move in space as they intersect and blend. A point of light – always the light – makes the colors of these shapes vary, while the color, intense, becomes its complementary by effect of that luminous point.

First of all I want my paintings to be a window of light and depth where before there was only a wall.

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