Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Torre, figuras y pájaros [Tower, Figures and Birds]

Image caption
JUAN FERNANDEZ LACOMBA

Torre, figuras y pájaros [Tower, Figures and Birds]

  • 1985
  • Oil on cloth
  • 220 x 195 cm
  • Cat. P_491
  • Acquired in 1991
By:
Frederic Montornés

Juan Fernández Lacomba is an art historian and exhibition curator who is convinced that in painting it is impossible to lie, because technical knowledge is needed to create. His visual art works are characterised by their underlying sensual, expressive analytical roots, the density of the cultural content that he explores and the way in which he focuses mainly on landscape as a point of access for exploring memory. His work is profoundly abstract, influenced by José Guerrero but above all by US painters of the New York School such as Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Jasper Johns. Lacomba soon decided to focus his passion on landscape art via a viscerally organic abstract style.

Based on brusque, expressive brush-strokes that call out to the emotions, and with a palette of predominantly earthy colours, he traces a path where three figures stroll through a landscape before a flock of birds taking flight, with a tower in the background that looks like La Giralda in Seville. Making use of description as in Tower, Figure and Birds (1985), he gives a glimpse of how landscape synthesises the meaning of post-abstraction for him.

For more than twenty years he has focused on the landscape of the marshlands along the Guadalquivir, working alone in his studio, which he funds by donating a picture per year. The other two works by Fernández Lacomba in the Collection date from the early 1990s: Cove. Straits and Fireworks (1990) and Untitled (1991). They both highlight his love of landscapes and the intensity of a mysticism bordering on the telluric that he strives for through their silent serenity.

Frederic Montornés

 
By:
Roberto Díaz
Juan Fernandez Lacomba
Seville 1954

Fernández Lacomba was born in Seville and graduated in History of Art from Seville University in 1977. That year he turned to painting, which he combined with his work as an exhibition curator. In 1981 Casa de Velázquez in Madrid offered him a grant. Two years later he was awarded another by the Ministry of Culture and in 1985 he obtained yet another from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to take a postgraduate course at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. On returning to Spain he set up a studio in Carmona, in the province of Seville. His painting, originally based on the tenets of the French support-surfaces movement, began to shift towards a style dominated by the abstract, balanced against certain elements that tended towards the figurative as he played with the gestural nature of pictorial art, with transparency and with forms that came close to the organic, occupying intermediate spaces or breaking free from the background of the picture.  A stand-out example of his work is the series Doñana Suite, which he began in 1995. In it, he plays with the gestural nature of brush-strokes, patches of colour, translucent layers and splattered paint combined with biomorphic shapes to produce his own particular vision of the natural landscape of Doñana natural park and its marshes.

His distinctions include the Luis Cernuda Painting Prize (1985) and the FOCUS Award for Visual Arts (1995). He has been a member of the Santa Isabel de Hungría Royal Academy of Fine Arts since 2012. Since the 1980s his work has appeared at leading galleries in Spain. He has forged particularly close links with the Juana de Aizpuru Gallery, which staged one of his first solo exhibitions in 1985. He has exhibited at the 5th Salón de los 16 event, at the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid (1985) and at group exhibitions at venues including the Canal de Isabel II (Madrid, 1987) and the Andalusia Contemporary Art Centre (Seville, 1993, 2000, 2002 & 2014).

Roberto Díaz

 
«Pintura liberada. Joven figuración española de los 80», Museo Carmen Thyssen (Malaga, 2025).
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 2. Vv.Aa. Pintura liberada. Joven figuración española de los 80, Malaga, Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga, 2025, p. 77.