José María Mezquita, the memory of what was lived

Almeria,

Antonio López was one of the artists who strongly supported the opening, last March, of the Museum of Contemporary Spanish Realism. MUREC in Almería, and in this first year of its activity, it will be one of its followers from its time of training who will exhibit in this same center: we are referring to José María Mezquita Gullón from Zamora, who first studied Aeronautical Engineering, but soon abandoned that career. to let himself be carried away by his artistic vocation and start Fine Arts.

From his early stage, meticulousness and slow craft were fundamental features of his production, in which he has tried to combine the reliable capture of reality with that of emotion, and his most common motifs have been the urban landscapes of his Zamora native and also those of the surrounding towns and natural areas, in which Mezquita finds mystery, a fundamental element both in his way of looking and in his work itself, and the result of his attention to what is different in everyday environments, to that which breaks with habits and routines and that does not require special sensitivity for its contemplation or enjoyment.

The painter pays attention to the structures of reality, fundamentally to the organic order of nature: he is interested in the modes of relationship between human beings and plant species and the way in which these ties can be perceived by the viewer; Due to this analysis of very specific reasons we could have the feeling that some of his images are immersed in the abstract, but this author’s work processes never escape the territory of the figurative. Its geometries are not abstract, but the result of a rigorous observation of realities that are very close to it and their scales.

In Almería we can see pieces made in recent years, belonging to his series Surroundings of the Palomares house, flour factories either Shop and home Almeida de Sayago: They are representative of other interests of the artist, such as the developments of traditional and industrial architecture, and the loneliness and sometimes current abandonment of these constructions; These are works clearly based on precise, linear drawings conceived as a tool for analyzing the structures of mills, businesses with history, industrial warehouses, flour mills or dovecotes.

The watercolor technique, which Mezquita usually uses, does not allow errors to be corrected, but this author takes all the liberties he can with it, within the limits derived from his materials; A soft but revealing lighting treatment becomes very relevant in his images, especially in those dedicated to interiors, with especially rich results when he paints those settings most subjected to the force of time.

The works of the Zamorano, at the same time refined and detailed, but completely far from hyperrealism, show us on the fragile support of paper – whether in the aforementioned watercolor or in Indian ink – apparent chaos in which Mezquita has imposed its hierarchy through of line and color, the latter transmitter of light, and has revealed fragments of memories from a near past, sometimes individual and sometimes perhaps collective; also suggestions of silences and forgetfulness.

In this exhibition, curated by Juan Manuel Martín Robles, attention has been paid to this graphic creation (he has also worked on canvas) and to his compositions from the last quarter of a century: most of them come from his personal collections and had not been shown to the public until now. They offer moments about places (as we said, nature, domestic, commercial and industrial spaces), which, if not represented from a calm perspective, could be lost in the sea of immediacy and novelty.