Jose Mijares – Color Without Borders

José María Mijares, or the painter of blues: the most profound color, into which the gaze penetrates endlessly and gets lost in the undefined, as before a perpetual lack of color. He is an artist who, over the course of more than 50 years of uninterrupted labor in painting, is, in our opinion, a bastion within contemporary art, one of the most authentic modern artists, as well as one of the strongest personalities today.

To speak of Mijares is to speak of a painter who is intrinsically modern, loyal to the time in which he was born, and one of the most outstanding figures in contemporary art. He was the "enfant terrible" of his generation: winner of the first prize of Cuban National Painting at just 29 years old. He has a style so his own that it permits him any and all thematic adventures in his paintings; we always recognize him. He has, as do all great creators, the facility to mutate form, yet he does it without losing the essence of what characterizes and gives a private stamp to all he produces.

We see this when we analyze his works from different periods and themes; and it is surprising to note that we are capable of recognizing both a marinal from the 1940s and one of the spatial works from the 1990s as his handiwork. At first glance it could seem they have nothing in common, but when we deepen the analysis we note that what makes us recognize the work as his, despite being so different in looks, is the arrangement of the constituent elements of forms. These forms are always the same. They come apart to later come together in multiple ways. His creative capacity is of such magnitude that it breaks away from the label "figurative" — that is to say, of something such as an image from our world — to a plastic idea in which lines and colors are united in a determined order creating a whole capable of an aesthetic existence without being a reference to anything in our surroundings. All this is done without letting us forget, and on occasions almost without realizing, how radical the changes in the forms are.

Apart from the formal stylistic concept which is valuable for conceiving his works, these paintings put us before a world recognizable yet distant from the objects that make up our surroundings; everything is transformed by this dream maker who makes us see analogies of musicians in the act of pulling notes from instruments whose existence we intuit more than see. While on other occasions he shows us intriguing medieval ideas of stained glass where the ironwork becomes, in a rare alchemy, an undulant black line that outlines the colored masses.