Juan Francisco Casas Exhibition

'Only exhibition'

The Fernando Pradilla gallery presents the seventh solo exhibition by Juan Francisco Casas (Jaén, 1976) entitled Non piangere. This is an exhibition inspired by the figure of the baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi in which the iconic works of the creator serve as a pretext for Casas to develop his characteristic iconography around the female body and its nature. The body as a place of political and social reflection that the spectator is confronted with from his own idiosyncrasy. How do we see ourselves? How do we see the other? What idea do we have of ourselves as an individual and social body? Casas refers very aptly to Clarice Lispector in her work The Greatest Experience in which the Brazilian author writes “Before I wanted to be the others to know what I was not. Then I understood that I had already been the others and that it was easy. My greatest experience would be to be the other of the others: the other of the others is me.” Casas' work, with a marked hyperrealistic character based on instant photography, is a biographical description of the events of his daily life. The artist portrays a playful world marked by endless parties, surrounded by his friends and girlfriends, where one perceives an exaltation of hedonism and living in the moment that has marked an entire generation of young millennials whose lives are overexposed on social networks.

Juan Francisco Casas has received numerous scholarships and awards, including those from the Colegio de España in Paris, the Ministry of Culture, the Scholarship of the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the ABC Drawing Prize. His work is represented in the collections of ARTIUM, Basque Museum of Contemporary Art, Vitoria, Spain; the ABC Collection, Madrid; the Collection of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the Collection of the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, as well as in numerous private collections in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain, the USA, Mexico, Colombia, and Spain.