Light in Juan Cantabrana

Cantabrana's plastic work and light are one and the same. This light in Cantabrana does not seem to be an element, but rather invisible energy, penetrating into the essence of things and making their everyday optical appearance disappear to then convert them into another type of energy. Cantabrana's painting participates to such an extent with that light, that its purely chromatic character vanishes as matter and it becomes a faithful messenger, in other words, in this artist's paintings, colour, rather than fulfilling a chromatic and defining function, breaks up into pure light, and everything that is matter, form, volume or lines, is nothing but elements of that light.

'Cantabrana's “Luminism”'..

Cantabrana expresses himself through a luminosity that pervades everything, it is an overwhelming force that envelops a world saturated with colours, which become luminaires, a luminous impressionism that does not seem to have any physical laws, but rather biological ones, since those gradients act as corpuscles of energy bringing life to every element observed in his work. As far as I am concerned, rather than impressionism, this is a type of “luminism”, since here the light, observed both biologically and psychically, is the art's noticeable support, it is no less than a melting pot of matter and light merging to articulate a plethoric language of energy.

José Salguero Carrera
Member of the International Association of Critics..

Juan Cantabrana was born in Cordoba on 7 July 1941.
At the age of 9, he was already making copies of the Italian Renaissance in oil on canvas, such as the "Madonna with Grapes". He acquired his first notions of formal drawing at the workshop of Amadeo Ruiz Olmos, located at that time in the street called Calle Sánchez de Feria, and at the School of Arts and Trades in Cordoba. From the age of thirteen, he painted some self-portraits and compositions with figures, such as “the shotgun boy”.

With a small group of friends –incipient artists- who included Fernando Polo de Alfaro and Jofra, he used to go out with his easel over his shoulder to paint small streets in Cordoba, such as the Portillo arch, where he would sometimes bump into another friend and Cordovan painter, Aurelio Moreno. On one of these painting incursions into the streets, he met the impressionist painter Pierre de Matehu, in the square called Plaza del Cristo de los Faroles, and he struck up a kind of friendship with him, the result of different days when he accompanied him, silently observing Matehu's natural way of painting.