Between Magic and Tangible Emotion

One of the hallmarks of Zulian pictorial figuration is its tendency toward magical realism and surrealism, and it is under these criteria that Johan Galué's work naturally belongs—one of the most prominent figures of the new generation of Zulia artists. Galué springs from that tradition but, by force of passion and perseverance, continually renews it. His work astonishes through its prolific output and the vehemence of images that lead us to ask to what extent dreams and emotions might also be the true reality.

The exhibition is organized around three major themes: Magic Worlds, Mutants, and Inner Beings. The first two, closely related, show scenes in which magic and surreality generate disconnected or dislocated situations—through painting and drawing in Magic Worlds and collage in Mutants. In Inner Beings, by contrast, the weight of the real falls on the world of emotions, shown through a vast gallery of drawings exhibited as portraits.

Three aspects run through his entire work: the value placed on the artist's craft—an illustrator and painter devoted to making and imagining; the intensely human connotation of his images, with extreme feelings expressed in the faces; and the creation of a symbolic cosmogony built from spatial dislocations and figures that break down all logic.

One of his obsessions is the image of germination: through stems, vines, ropes, and linear graphics, the artist binds beings and things in a relationship of intense vitality, where a figure can be man and plant at once. That dislocation is not only of meaning but of scale: everything is intentionally disproportionate, and in that disproportion, in that world of uncertainties, lies his power to provoke astonishment and instability.