An irrepressible urge

Sensitivity and inspiration, work and perspiration, speed and chance, intuition and improvisation, imagination and the subconscious. Creating as an irrepressible urge, as something essential, as what defines and places us, a reason to be, to do, to exist, to live and to grow. Jesús de Miguel is an artist without a script, because some things cannot be foreseen, because what beats, beats regardless.

Like a jazz musician with shifting, frenetic interests, like an omnivorous DJ remixing whatever he likes, our artist does not group his works in series but in sessions, in brief or long stretches of time where creation, instinct, desire and talent converge to produce one piece or a thousand, all or none: trial, error and success.

An overwhelming energy, and at times its excess, forces him into a self-control that seeks simplicity, that aims for the plainness of forms at risk of being buried by the excess of passion and desire, by a creative will without limits or brakes. Where his voracity stops just in time is where his best works are found, those that avoid the “more” that is almost always “less”.

That path towards the basic, towards an essence that does not give up expression, vibration and strength, is what this exhibition for Estudi Tur Costa in Ibiza brings together. A proposal that claims the autonomy of painting through its intrinsic values: gesture, colour, support, abstraction, a deliberate absence of technical virtuosity, forms that can only be sensed, strokes that barely make up a structure, an almost edible material, a balance as subtle as it is unstable; works that call for painting for painting’s sake and art for art’s sake.

But Jesús de Miguel’s pieces are not a mere aesthetic exercise. There is also an underlying ethic, an idea that questions us about human folly, about the absurd, about error as distortion but also as a lifeline, about the origin of things, about mysticism, genius and thought, about technological alienation and the contemporary whirlwind, about contemplation and introspection, about hedonism and the pursuit of pleasure. Many ideas together, some jumbled, and the painting as an effective, autonomous container for all of them.

And in that privileged device, without anxiety or inhibition, the artist’s creative influences meet. Dada and underground pop, American informalism and science fiction, high and low culture, film and television, comics and cartoons, punk and trash, cave paintings, the emoji and the hieroglyph, sign and symbol, visual poetry and the anarchic gesture, classical heroes and B-movie characters, a sense of humour and irony. A mix of interests and emotions that reflect this irrepressible urge we call art, which some sensitive beings like Jesús de Miguel live with.

Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta