José Luis Fuentetaja Paternity Oil Acrylic On Canvas Painting Realism Spain Sitges 70s C.1980

Frameless.

Is born in Madrid on the 21st july 1951.
After attending primary school, he starts to grow an enormous tendency for drawing.
At the age of 14 he begins to work in advertising and attends to the Vallecas school of arts.
At the age of 14 he travels to Switzerland and in Geneve he gets intensly into painting and decides to dedicate himself only to it.
When he returns to Spain he enrolls Arts Studies, and at the begining of summer '66, he visits Sitges, where he'll come back year after year and where ultimately he'll set his home.

At this time he starts selling his painting in the flea market in Madrid and later in Sitges, setting himself on the street, thus completing his studies and making it economically.

While he's in Madrid he recives lessons by Pedro Mozas at Bellas Artes and starts to learn profoundly about painting.
In 1969 he starts painting portraits in the streets.

In Sitges he creates, with other friends, a great artistic atmosphere in the Paseo de la Ribera, by the sea, that today still exists.
He starts travelling through Europe, visiting and painting in Paris, London and Amsterdam.
In the middle of this bohemian epoque, he moves to the Cannary Islands during the winters for 5 years in a row, he moves in the Parque de Santa Catalina "Las Palmas de Gran Canaria" where he works and meet all sorts of people in the streets, which later would mark his pictoric line.

He becomes friend with Sidney Nagley in 1969, who organizes his first exhibition in Toronto, Canada.
Afterwards he'll leave his studies and start painting exclusively in his studio.

He gathers his first exhibition in the Ateneu of Barcelona in 1970.
He befriends with the art critic of La Vanguardia, Fernando Gutierrez and the Count of Caralt orders him a set of illustration for a new edition of Garcia Lorcas Romancero Gitano.
His first exhibition in a commercial gallery is done in the Majestic Gallery in Barcelona with a gorgeous collection of nudity drawings.
He achieves huge success and for some years he affords his painting thanks to those drawings.

During a period in Madrid, Mr Ponce de León, a consul in the Ministry of Exterior Affairs grants him with bachelor degree to study in the prestigious Academia de España in Rome.
However, he can't accept it due to militar service obligations.

Some days later, before joining the ranks he opens in the Cuatre Gats (Palma de Mallorca) with hiperrealist pieces that already then he presented as the first painter in that city, that later would become a fashion in 1973.

After this period he meets José Maria Gudiol who advises positively.
Since then, the intense work and the fight for daily improvement that has become the trademark of his life. The seek of styles and situations, the journeys through Europe always aware of all the tendencies that have in the art line that we can see nowadays.
At his more than fifty years given to paint, his individual exhibitions beat the 100, his artwork is highly appreciated and valued in the complex market of art.

In October 1982 hi makes his first exhibition in Tarragona. In the catalogue, writing of the unforgettable Fernando Gutierrez, he says "Fuentetaja is an artist of character and exceptional upbringing with a masterly knowledge of technique and resourses, and personality completely uncommon to the dimension of his sensitivity, as the richness of his deep and bloomed liricism.

A judgement as accurate as foreseeing for the future outstanding of the artist, in where his paint soared through different phases mantaining an unquestionable quality. Lines, cubist, expressionist and hiperrealist till his current realism, in the middle of his creative maturity.
Jose Luis Fuentetaja has lived and overcome in his live hard stages, some of them very difficult that took him to feel tired and deceived by the Western World.
It's because of this that he made his first trip to India, which was extended for months and which became a major source of inner peace for his thoughts. Afterwards in practically 20 years he has returned there more than 25 occasions.

He has split every year into two halves, two studies, two atmospheres, the one in Sitges and the one in Calanguta (Goa), where at the arrival he salutes with his hands at chin height and his head slightly inclined and pronounces "Namasté" which preceeds the brotherly hug of the "meeting again".

The marvellous world of India and Nepal, Benares, Bombay, Katmandú, Jaipur, Kuri in his various atmospheres in his busyness and beauty, chromatic explosion, permanent festival for the eyes of light and color, even when the splandour of fantastic monuments and treasures can be found, side by side with the most terrible miseries. Becoming a part of the mundane, has inspired the artist.
A fascinating life that Jose Luis Fuentetaja has manage to capture in all its spontaneity, dedicated to the unstoppable pictoric labour of magical and vibrant realism.

Men and women, kids, lots of kids, houses, markets, surprising garments, secular jobs, liturgies, figure in this authentic plastic tradition of a singular universe that is the old Indostan, engaged in its ancestral experiences.

Una vida fascinante que Jose Luis Fuentetaja ha sabido captar en toda su espontaneidad, volcado en una infatigable lavor pictorica de magico y vibrante realismo.

Hombres y mujeres, niños, muchos niños, viviendas, mercados, sorprendentes indumentarias, oficios seculares, liturgias, figuran en esta autentica traducción plástica del singular universo que es el antiguo indostán, inmerso aun en sus ancentrales experiences.
During the last years, Fuentetaja has continued to pictoric pilgrimmage around plenty of places in America and Asia specially, making out of his experiences a plastic translation almost universal, all of those places divide his painting stages very definite, for example, the Caribean collection, Cuba, Venecia, Bali, Vietnam, Thailand and finally the last stage in which he's immerse, Birmania (Mianmar), its people and landscapes, trying to transmit the beauty of all those places through his paintings to the conscience of the Western World.

Condition report:

Excellent