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Cigurí verde, 1993
1993
Mixed media on canvas
Dimensions: 200 x 169.5 cm
Reference: ACF0059
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This painting was shown in 1994 at the artist’s regular gallery, Soledad Lorenzo, alongside others belonging to the same series, such as El lugar del ombligo, Escenas de montañas, Herradura reposada or Polvo, cuchillos. It was the artist’s first solo exhibition after coming into contact with Schnabel and the success of his participation in the student group exhibition Propuesta 92 at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid.
The artwork can be seen as defining the limits as well as attenuating the influence of the American artist on Galindo’s early work. More than a formal dependence, this influence is best described as a coinciding attitude towards the act of painting itself, along with a particular “literary fiction” about the life of the modern painter that both artists share. For example, Galindo once had his workspace in a banana warehouse turned workshop and his studio is currently located in the former wine cellar of what was once the home of Domingo Ortega, a legendary bullfighter, in Boróx (Toledo).
The accumulation of paint by applying it with broad strokes or by flinging or dripping (always thicker than Pollock’s “dripping”) is a distinguishing trait of Galindo’s work. Others include the density of the colour (often subdued, at times glowing, but always eluding any and all transparency of light) and the assemblage of materials of dubious origin. The latter is absent from this particular piece, but it is a trait that characterises much of his work, focusing on elements of the “poor” or references to precarious forms of existence. At the same time, sexuality pervades the sensuality of his process. Much like the intentionally provocative nature of his titles, which fall somewhere between ironic and sarcastic and display undeniably sentimental undertones, these unique characteristics define a painter with his own kind of poetry, once described by the critic Kevin Power as the “poetry of excess”. In the same text, which introduced the aforementioned exhibition, Power described Cigurí verde as a painting “that allows us to glimpse the dense forests that explorers dreamed of, even when they were in the middle of a fog”.
