Talking about José Juárez’ works always represents a new questioning about them. He makes us search a new focusing with respect to every single change in connection with his artistic production. He’s been through all the trends ending with "ism", but he undoubtedly remains coherent as to his main feature: the universal side of his expression, the colorfulness and the quality of his work; i.e., his technical-pictorial quality. Quoting Jean Cassou1, José Juárez is a Mexican artist settled in France; therefore, we can regard him as part of what is known as the "Paris school".

However, his Mexican origin, the Mexican history and its place with the universal culture should also be taken into account. Mexican people, be it pre-Columbian, colonial or modern ones, have always stood out due to their remarkable artistic talent. These people have always shown a creative imagination in several ways, according to the time and place, but always in a prestigious manner. Therefore, José Juárez is a great painter, descending from an outstanding lineage of pre-Columbian artists, or may we say from a whole realm of artistic races.

Due to the aforementioned, he becomes perfectly aware of his environment. He has studied the wonders behind Mexican pre-Columbian Indians, as well as the Baroque age. He has conducted sociological works on the mural painting movement that took part during the 1911 revolution in Mexico. Yet, he belongs to the generation that acknowledges the motivations and values of that collective school of thought, and he expresses through a personal search. During certain periods, he experienced with the abstract art, and said has provided him a great technical freedom –particularly in the domain of space- and lively colorist skills.
 

Now that he has reached maturity and yet he still has so much to offer to us, he unleashes a "poetic fantasy" -that has always been the secret of his youth, as well as the rich variety of his origins. In this day and time, we know this "poetic fantasy" as surrealism. Therefore, it is natural that we perceive Juárez’ art with surrealistic expressionism features. Of course, this is just a concept, which is not enough to encompass his art within the boundaries of the term. Juárez’ surrealistic expressionism is quite of his own, and the fascination it reflects is also very peculiar.

It is formed both by graciousness and violence. Any person who is struck by the mysteries of the Mexican soul will find Juarez’ art as essentially Mexican and fascinating. He will find in us those new discoverers, naïve conquerors of those strange marvels that have been influencing our thoughts throughout the centuries. Juárez, with his sweet and tranquil appearance, his soft yet ironic constancy, bearing the weight of the fabulous past where he was born and the consciousness he has gained due to the resources of his work, is confident about his charm: he consciously employs it within the boundless extension of the empires of poetry.

Nowadays, Juárez’ artistic figuration and creating aspiration is no longer reproductive: it’s become conceptual or expressive, ideographic or pictographic.
 

chromatic conglomerates that show their best artistic effects when they refer to movement. Regarding figuration, Juan Acha2 states the following: "Juárez comes from the pop figuration, which he utilized in an ironic manner and with a contra-cultural spirit. When he decided to ratify the visual information of the human body, he finds the ideas of neo-figurative school, such as those by Bacon, and adopts the idea of setting disfiguration and surroundings with a high degree of naturalism. However, he soon leaves such influences behind, since most of his paintings are a merge of influences and they have now become invisible in front of our eyes.

Juárez’ canvas show several human images, or arranged in polyptych sets if there is only one person in each painting. The human body turns into a set of chromatic conglomerates that show their best artistic effects when they refer to movement.

Figures represent movements or actions, instead of personages moving or in action. Disfiguration is of a pictorial nature, in the same manner as deforming expressionism denies naturalism and the photographic nature. He uses no deformations. Instead, he hides iconic information to let the color do the entire job and offers a kind of blurred evocation, whose anthropomorphic likelihood draws our attention. Disfiguration is somehow the informer and the color sensitizes.
 
 

However, Juárez does not conform only to express what comes to his mind spontaneously; he builds, transforms, organizes and reflects on the concepts of his theoretical investigations.

Juárez does not show in his works what the human eye can see; he analyses the shapes and creates a language of their own. So far, it is evident that his "staging" is aimed at preserving the primal y integrity of the idea and fixing in the space of the artistic object. Juárez does not deform; instead, he transforms a single object as many times as required to achieve his objective. Let’s say that the pictorial "image staging" is the transformation process of the sign; he starts from reality, interprets and transforms it, and gradually creates a new sign – i.e., a "new figuration". He holds no other truth than that when we start writing or painting: to make the spectator watch constantly his pictorial objects. In a nutshell, the unique substitution while transforming the form is as follows: ¿What is the pictorial object, how can it be named? ¿What is the primordial need of images over the words?
 

Finally, Juárez says, family images, which are secret during privacy and proposed in his pictorial speech, are those we are accustomed with; our private and public life always describe space. We can imagine such space as discontinuous or scattered in so many pieces that every part has its own meaning, related to "other" or "others".

His work is always changing, as well as his transformation of the sign we are referring to, yet it remains coherent with his artistic process. His recent works constantly show the feminine body -a detail that appears in most of his paintings. His rupture with the works produced in the 80’s is evident.

He tells us that said is a sort of a necessary freedom for his idiosyncrasy. In fact, his recent works break up with the technique and the form used during a long period of time, when he was the Director of Dolores Olmedo museum. Juárez deems every single change as indispensable and beneficial; changing is being born again, for him his mission with regards to the museum has come to an end.

He also says that nude is an art style made up by the Greeks in the 5^th century, in the same way as the opera is a style invented in Italy in the 17^th century. Such conclusion might seem rude, yet it also shows that nude is not a subject for art, but an art style instead. A pile of nudes will not touch our empathy; au contraire, it produces a sense of disappointment and dejection. But Juárez does not want to copycat its nature; he was to perfect it. Therefore, although a naked body is nothing but the starting point of his artistic work, it also becomes an important excuse for him. In this manner, Juárez shows more explicitly that nude is not only the body; he relates it to all the structures that have become part of our imaginative experience. The Greeks perfected nudes to allow mankind to feel it as a god. In a certain way, this is still their function; although we no longer assume God to be a beautiful man, we keep on feeling like in heaven when we seem to acquaint of the universal order by means of our body.

However, he does not always represent the full human body, he fragments it or places a part, or a "detail". Sometimes, the feminine figure is shown at the foreground or as a shadow cast on the main figure, but sometimes it also unfolds into the spaces of the composition he usually triangulates. Detail represent no problem to Juárez, but the way in which he uses it in a plastic level, organizes or structures. He define detail as then Italian language describes it like a - particolare – this is as a fragment of an entire totality of one object or a set of objects. He proposes this in a historic frame, differentiating it from - dittagli-, being the latter one the excessive care of details. The artist takes take of the work as a whole, and the feminine detail that he proposes is a part of the composition itself.
 

(1).-Writer and sociologist, founder of Paris’ Modern Art Museum

(2).-Sociologist and art reviewer