This is how Juana Francés was built

Alicante,

In the past year, lavish in centenaries, that of Juana Francés, born in Alicante as Juana Concepción Francés de la Campa and died in Madrid in 1990, was somewhat overshadowed. She was the only woman who was part of the El Paso group, one of the first figures of our informalism and achieved critical recognition during her lifetime, both in her figurative beginnings and in the last stages of her career; However, it has been relegated in the exhibition panorama and in historiography, from the sixties until recently.

One of the centers that has been working hardest to make his legacy known is the Museum of Contemporary Art of Alicante. MACA, which has recently dedicated exhibitions to her abstract painting (boxes, lands, comets, seabeds) and now explores her first steps in “Juana Francés. The construction of a modern artist, 1945-1956.”

It is the least known phase of his career, but not the least relevant: in addition to trying to define himself and differentiate himself at the same time, like all authors in their beginnings, he was characterized by his compilation of references, a priori, difficult to fit in, such as the Italian aura, symbolism, metaphysical surrealism and geometry. The fruit of so many studies in different directions resulted, in his case, in forceful and material canvases of apparently traditional themes (families, still lifes, portraits of children and women) that shelter mysticism and mystery.

To achieve his textures and fillings, French used encaustics: he mixed wax, resin and solvent on rigid supports, superimposing layers of paint that he then broke, wounded, with a nail. These codes brought his language closer to that of mural painting and would anticipate his inclination for experimentation, a continuous mark on his career.

Juana French. The construction of a modern artist, 1945-1956. MACA, Alicante

He had trained at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in the second half of the forties, receiving teachings there anchored in impressionism filtered by Sorolla and little open to new international currents. Obtaining scholarships, he was able to travel, already in the fifties, to France and Italy and there he received new and more contemporary influences: in Paris, those of the art brut of Dubuffet, those of Picasso, Jean Fautrier, Pierre Soulages, Bernard Buffet, Wols and Hans Hartung; already in the Italian chapter, those of Uccello, Piero della Francesca or Andrea Mantegna.

Her first individual exhibition took place in 1956 at the Ateneo in Madrid and in that year she also undertook a new, long-term trip through Europe, where she was able to come into contact with other trends. Since then he has always maintained his commitment to his work, adopting the possibility and duty of making a living from it, becoming professional and actively participating in artistic life in Spain.

During his training in Madrid, Francés made the expected copies of the Prado Museum, landscapes with impressionist echoes, portraits of family members and drawings, especially of female nudes. When he painted, he used to spread the oil paint on the canvas with a palette knife, thus achieving flat colors for his still lifes, human figures and motherhoods. They are common issues among female artists, but in Alicante they lose sweetness in favor of a disturbing aspect, linked to their hieraticism and frontality.

In his still lifes, as simple as they are solid, we find a rough material made of thick paste and his objects, which seem strange to us despite being familiar to us, are arranged on light backgrounds with hard lines or among rather dark darkness. Among his favorite tones were turquoise green and chrome yellow.

Around 1952, large compositions populated by voluminous human figures, with a geometric cut and soft symbolism, appear in his production. These are silent, stunned or imperturbable figures, with archaic or schematic forms; partly classical. Curiously, in them the mouths are barely visible or are not painted; In some cases they even cover themselves with their hands: it could be an allusion to the political context of that time. Cold tones dominate and we appreciate unreal architectural forms that place these scenes between magical realism and metaphysical surrealism.

His first clearly experimental pieces date from the mid-fifties: we are talking about cardboard and canvases without perspective, which already walk between the figurative and the abstract and seem to refer to Kandinsky and Klee. These compositions, with more vivid tones and executed in techniques such as grattagehe frottage or encaustic, he did not show them, but they trace the beginning of a path with no turning back that led to the informalist and material abstraction in which he immersed himself in 1957, already outside the period analyzed in this exhibition.

Not all of the artist’s paintings made between 1945 and 1956 are preserved, but a good part of them are preserved by the four institutions to which this author donated her legacy: the Reina Sofía Museum, the IAACC Pablo Serrano in Zaragoza, the IVAM in Valencia and the MACA in Alicante itself. Other pieces on the tour come from the Studiolo Collection of Candela A. Soldevilla, that of the Spanish Tourism Institute, the family of Nellina Pistolesi, those of Francés Coloma and Izard Francés.