In 1990, Julio Juste unveiled a series of works at the Sen Gallery in Madrid inspired by charts of the heavens, with the generic title of ‘The Future in Three Chapters”. Celestial Hemisphere (1990) was part of that exhibition, along with other works in different formats but similar themes, with titles taken from the same semantic field, such as Celestial Chart, Planimetry of the Orb and Mapping of the Sky, dated between 1989 and 1999. This series was similar in its lines to the great fresco cycle that he completed in 1989 on the vaulting of the headquarters of the Euro-Arab Foundation for Higher Studies at the University of Granada. All these works show how comfortable he was with non-conventional formats in acrylic and oil, from a cape to the linen tondo of Celestial Hemisphere.

As part of the generation striving to rehabilitate figurative art, and given his aesthetic affinity, Juste’s interest in this work lies in astrological symbols and the zodiac and their presence in late medieval painting. Juste has been described as a ‘southern disciple of Giotto’, given his shared interest with the Tuscan master in cloudscapes with striking colours and expressive force in themselves and not only in the context of a narrative composition. This dialogue with the classical world and its legacy and the central role of astronomy and astrology in it is can also be seen in contemporaries such as Guillermo Pérez Villalta. Yet in Juste, this interest in the signs of unorthodox, arcane wisdom is not without irony, taking into account its role in popular culture at the end of the 20^th century with the spread of horoscopes. As Juste wrote when describing the time when he showed these paintings to visitors to his studio: ‘The content of the second chapter coincided with the third whisky: those celestial charts were created to the clinking of ice cubes against the glass before the first swig. I was talking about a new age of the signs and the mapping of their location, subject, as heroes are, to paradoxical contradictions and ironic exercise [...]: “the mocking ran parallel to heroes”’.

In a gesture reminiscent of Joan Miró, who sought guidance in the Constellations during a short period around the start of World War II, Juste looked upwards in Celestial Hemisphere at a time of disenchantment with the entry of Spanish art into the international scene and its mainstreaming and neutralisation, as phenomena such as the countercultural ‘movida´ were absorbed by the establishment  and some of its members were lost. That link between the intimate and the cosmic, suggested by contemplating the celestial sphere, brings to mind a quote from Carlos Berlanga, one of the icons of the popular culture of his generation, that Juste used as the heading of his PhD thesis years later:  ‘conjectures about a universe / that expands like you and I’.

Carlos Martín