José Carretero
Tomelloso (Ciudad Real) 1962

Carretero studied commercial draughtsmanship at the Granada School of Arts and Crafts. In 1981 he obtained a scholarship from the Regional Department for Education and Culture of Castilla-La Mancha and in 1988 another to study at the Spanish Academy in Rome. His pictorial work from that period, first exhibited in 1984, is essentially figurative, with influences from avant-garde languages. It depicts scenes from the artist's everyday and experiential surroundings, with a strong dreamlike element. During the 1990s, his style became more schematic and faceted, and he began to use plain colours, in a nod to the visual idiom of the graphic novel. From then on, his paintings began to reflect the obsessions, dreams and memories of his childhood in La Mancha. These intimate family pictures, domestic interiors, urban scenes and landscapes transport us back to specific emotional and affective situations. The compositions are full of narrative details, but these are depicted with a certain coolness and a strange detachment. The result is that his work transcends the individual to engender a collective memory of the period. He has continued to develop this process in subsequent decades.

Since the 1980s his work has regularly been exhibited on the Spanish gallery circuit, with numerous solo exhibitions, among others at the Provincial Museum of Ciudad Real (1991); Caja Vital Kutxa Foundation (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 1995); Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid, 2004); Casa de Vacas del Retiro (Madrid, 2007); Ateneo (Madrid, 2012) and the Almagro Contemporary Art Centre (Ciudad Real, 2015). He has received numerous grants and scholarships, including the General Council for Cultural Relations scholarship (New Delhi, 1990) and the AMEXCID scholarship (2015).

Roberto Díaz