Retratos (Portraits)

Curro González is a Seville artist who came to prominence in the 1980s in the milieu surrounding the magazine Figura and in galleries such as La máquina española and Juana de Aizpuru. A figurative painter, he became interested in caricature, believing it “works like an antidote to dogmatism”.
González took part in the exhibition El artista y la ciudad (The Artist and the City), curated by Mar Villaespesa as part of the Plus Ultra art project. The work Retratos (Portraits) was shown in bars and window displays in Seville’s city centre and the Arenal neighbourhood frequented by the artist and those portrayed, his friends and colleagues. “The jugs,” wrote Villaespesa, “lean out, with their grotesque features, of the display cases in bars and from the edge of the shelves; they smile, asking us about the limit between the private and public sphere”. The installation was conceived, according to the artist, “as a tribute to friendship and shared affection, as well as to debates full of involvement and disagreements which have ultimately shaped our identity over these years”.
González’s jugs follow the Toby Jug template, which uses functional and decorative pottery developed by Staffordshire ceramicists in the eighteenth century and features the entire body of seated figures. They also draw from the series of raw clay caricature-esque portraits of Honoré Daumier, Célébrités du Juste milieu (1832 -1835), and Paul Gauguin’s Jug Self-Portrait (1889), which utilised the concepts of the grotesque and the sinister, respectively, within artistic tradition. Thus, González’s work stands within the poetics of the everyday, of the bar as a social space and one of communication, putting forward an express criticism of the separation between decorative arts and fine arts and approaching new channels of communication for “high art”.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio