JORGE GALINDO
ONE FINE DAY

KÖNIG GALERIE
9 MARCH – 13 APRIL 2024

OPENING
7 MARCH 2024 | 6–8 PM

KÖNIG GALERIE is pleased to present 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.

Exhibition opening © Images by KÖNIG GALERIE

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.

© Installation view by Roman März

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.