José María Cuasante

Graduated in Philosophy and Letters from the Complutense University of Madrid, he obtained a doctorate in Fine Arts, initially becoming interested in informalism. In 1971 he exhibited his work for the first time, whose marked attachment to reality makes it immediately associated with Spanish realist painting. But in his paintings he develops a cold line, closer to North American hyperrealism, although ignoring the monumental scale, than to the chronicle of social denunciation. At the beginning of the eighties, he obtained a scholarship from the Juan March Foundation to further his studies abroad. As a result, his work becomes more spontaneous, as can be seen in the family portraits or in the series of still lifes, in which an increase in the saturation of chromaticism is appreciated. Progressively, he broadens his theme from the domestic sphere to scenes of urban life, while stylistically he transforms his initial photographic realism into a neo-expressionism whose gaze focuses on light and color, the true bases of his painting. In 1987, he began a return to approaches more attached to the visual and the perceptual, which in the 1990s took shape in the representation of interiors withdrawn on themselves. At present, his work is characterized by a return to the extreme naturalism of its beginnings with a theme centered on the streets of the big city and beach scenes. His method of work starts with photographic posters, and later he makes, at the same scale, a monochromatic drawing, without shading. The figures appear almost cut out, with marked differences in tones and a preponderance of red, in an aesthetic that refers to advertising images typical of the mass media.