BERLIN.- KÖNIG GALERIE is presenting ONE FINE DAY, a solo exhibition by Spanish painter, Jorge Galindo, his first with the gallery. Eight paintings made of oil and glued wallpaper on canvas, all created between 2022 and 2024, display the breadth and visual intricacy of Galindo’s large tableaux, combining both found material and large, gestural brushwork. For over four decades, Galindo has been refining and expanding his artistic practice with these elements and ONE FINE DAY offers a concentrated view into the latest iterations of Galindo’s unique pictorial language.

The title of the exhibition, ONE FINE DAY, is taken from The Chiffons’s 1963 song of the same name and offers a memento for Galindo of the auspicious working conditions in his studio in Porto, Portugal. The studio is both the site of production and a motif within Galindo’s practice, evidenced by a 2009 exhibition in which the artist transported the entire contents of his studio, including over 400 works on paper, to the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de León. The floral and vegetal elements in the current presentation enact a dizzying dialogue between paint and glued wallpaper, which references the studio environment more obliquely, recreating the profusion of surfaces within the creative environment. More than mere painted images, Galindo’s works become worlds unto themselves, sites of energy and convergence between differing modes of production, where the surface of a canvas enacts push-pull without rest or resolution.

The distance between Galindo’s earliest experiments from the late 1980s is palpable in ONE FINE DAY, evidence of a process of refinement from his initial creations that focused more on material and tactile aspects than on pictorial grammar, using tarpaulin, burlap, and other discarded fabrics as well as a variety of found materials employed in place of conventional canvas supports. Iconographic and visual references subsequently made an appearance in his works, through collage and photomontage – two distinctive techniques of his visual language – and the incorporation into the pictorial space of prints taken from calendars, advertising magazines, and film journals. Galindo continues to establish a dramatic relationship with painting – colorful, gestural, expressionistic, and sometimes bordering on abstraction.

Compositions like those in ONE FINE DAY are energetic but balanced, where flowers emerge amidst footprints, woven together through splashes of paint and vehement strokes. Galindo's monumental paintings require a strenuous, active relationship – almost performative in nature – between the canvas and the artist's own body, in a process in which the eye finds no rest in the violence that the hand imposes. In his surfaces, the painter leaves the trace of living. A living centered in the studio, the artist's favorite place, where he wants to spend most of his time. Galindo covers the surface of the studio with canvases that collect the drops of paint that the brushes dispose of. What might otherwise be discarded, or understood as accidental and fleeting, now becomes the background of other canvases. This process, accentuated by the raw materiality of the walls of the former Nave of St. Agnes, creates an endless logic of substitution and redistribution, of surface, color, and gesture, an expanded purview of painting.

Jorge Galindo (b. 1965 in Madrid) is one of the most outstanding and original Spanish artists of his generation, whose production has had an impact on the international scene. He began exhibiting his work at the end of the 1980s when he was associated with the Workshops of Current Art at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. His initial creations focused more on material and tactile aspects than on pictorial grammar, using tarpaulin, hessian, and other waste fabrics and even employing a variety of found materials in place of conventional canvas supports. Iconographic and visual references subsequently made an appearance in his works, through collage and photomontage – two distinctive techniques of his visual language – and the incorporation into the pictorial space of prints taken from calendars, advertising magazines, and film journals.

An heir to the Spanish pictorial tradition, Galindo has established a dramatic relationship with painting. There is something tragic beneath the apparent joy of his colours and his expansive gestures. As Bernardo de Pinto de Almeida points out in the exhibition catalogue, his production can be characterised as a brand of experimental, post-pictorial painting that is free from preceding formal and conceptual limitations. Galindo's work has the ability to absorb and integrate different sources of popular culture, revealing a new understanding of the very act of painting which allows it to freely develop and constantly reinvent itself. In his latest paintings he continues to use collage – a method he has employed since the beginning of his career – in compositions which resort to the chaotic juxtaposition of strips of old wallpaper and odds and ends of found material from which, however, patterns emerge. His painting is born of gesture, of rapid execution: it is an intensely physical art that transcends all norms, developed using his very own methods and processes. Galindo's monumental paintings require a strenuous, active relationship – almost performative in nature – between the canvas and the artist's own body. Las flores salvajes continues to explore the historically popular theme of floral motifs, renewed by Jorge Galindo's exuberant and sensual vision of the classic still life, executed on a monumental scale. Flowers make us think of beauty, joy, desire, or mourning and bind us to our habitat. The artist's interest in depictions of flowers began in 2009, encompassing various media in his artistic practice, and even led to a series of works produced in collaboration with film director Pedro Almodóvar in 2019. Galindo's paintings are colourful, gestural, expressionistic, and sometimes bordering on abstraction: energetic but balanced compositions, in which flowers emerge amidst footprints, splashes of paint, and vehement strokes. In some of these compositions, the artist continues to experiment with the pictorial space by adding strips of wallpaper adorned with floral-pattern designs and ornamental motifs, which become decorative borders that serve as a frame for the flowers done in oil paint. The designs featured on the patterned wallpaper – which usually comes from second-hand stores, street markets, and antique shops – is in contrast with the quick and loose gestural brushwork of the artist's hand. In other works, oil is applied over digital prints made on canvas. These pieces, destined for contemplation, allow for a multiplicity of different readings. For Jorge Galindo, who has adhered to his own narrative for more than three decades, painting flowers has to do with the celebration of life, the sheer pleasure of painting, defended as a means of expression and creative freedom.