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Guerrero knew how a slight alteration could radically transform the inner scale of an image and convert it into another, and he did not hesitate to make use of that “rewriting” in many of his canvasses, reworking them almost completely over very long periods, maintaining and cooling the gesture in the case of his compositions from the fifties and sixties, and restructuring them in the seventies and eighties.
YOLANDA ROMERO
There is neither figurative nor abstract painting, only good or bad painting, and it’s very hard to learn to do it well.
JOSÉ GUERRERO
After the discipline of the Phosphorescences, in my view there began the most admirable cycle of all of Guerrero’s admirable oeuvre, covering almost all of the seventies. Combining order and freedom, the artist was able to find the manner in which his pictures were energetic and yet tranquil, substantial and yet succinct. In addition, he began to leave to one side the compositional rigidity that characterized the period of the Phosphorescences.
JUAN MANUEL BONET
I had my first observations of colour in a convent in Granada called Las Esclavas, where as children we were prepared for communion. Rays of light shone through the stained glass windows onto the clean bald heads of the worshippers at the Nocturnal Adoration. There were spheres and ovals, green, blue, yellow, violet and red, and my thoughts followed the changes in the movement and colour on those bald heads, tired from a whole night of worship, and finally with the coming of dawn we went to Mass and the rays of light illuminated us all.
JOSÉ GUERRERO
Red has this… it’s nothing tragic or anything like that… red… the red ochre that we used in the villages of Andalusia… a red taken from the earth… it’s not vermillion by any means, but it has its own beauty…
JOSÉ GUERRERO
(…) those mirror-like sheets of water around which some parts of the Alhambra are centred, continue the interesting architectural theme used by José Guerrero in 1973 to capture the enigmatic composition he titled Alcazaba: the occasional existence, together with frequent symmetrical vertical lines, of other horizontal lines defined by the reflection of the real images on the surface of the pools.
EDUARDO QUESADA DORADOR
Opposite my house in the Vistillas quarter, there was a cloistered convent, which in turn was quite close to the prison. My mother, who was very religious, used to take me to the convent, which was white on the outside, but I only saw darkness inside. They set me on the turntable and the nuns on the other side would admire me. Half a turn and I passed from bright light to darkness.
JOSÉ GUERRERO
It was one of his match boxes, bright blue and red and black, those matches that remind one of columns and arches in mosques, disproportionate American oversize and yet a hidden suggestion of an interior in Granada.
ANTONIO MUÑOZ MOLINA
When I paint, I feel like a resistance fighter seeking freedom to liberate my intuitions and emotions, simply and with complete control. The paintings open up windows and doors leading to a path in the distance, where there is limitless, endless light and air and water.
JOSÉ GUERRERO
I am certain José Guerrero was acutely aware he was playing with fire in these works we have brought together for this exhibition. He was moving along a narrow, dangerous, and apparently contradictory edge taking him from the subjective to the objective, from unconscious to conscious, from gesture to containment, from abstraction to figuration. But it is precisely along these risky “trails” that Guerrero found the energy necessary to continue being a painter in spite of everything.
YOLANDA ROMERO