JORGE GALINDO: ONE FINE DAY

KÖNIG GALERIE presents ONE FINE DAY by Jorge Galindo. 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.

March 9 – April 13, 2024

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.

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.