Jose Luis Ceña was born in Malaga in 1982 and is currently living and working in Madrid.
Two ideas are being explored in inventive and exciting ways by the Spanish painter Jose Luis Ceña. These ideas are the twin foundations of painting: the concepts of form and color.
Regarding form, he investigates the essential question of how can we make meaningful paintings in the aftermath of the abstract art movements of the 20th century? And especially now in 2020, how can abstraction function in a world of super realist digital photography?
Compositionally, Jose often presents scenes that owe something to the spontaneous feeling of photographs. Like that fleeting moment caught when someone opens a door, climbs a tree, or jumps down to earth. The subjects in his paintings are not posing for the viewer in a traditional sense, but caught in an instant that documents them. The people in the paintings usually ignore the viewer. They do not meet or acknowledge the audience’s gaze, this increasing a sense of voyeurism, of looking in, unmet. We are the unacknowledged watchers, viewing in secret. This touches on the time we live in, of omnipresent surveil- lance ignored. We are constantly observed, videotaped, scanned, and photographed, even in everyday lifes ordinary moments. Jose’s scenes are populated by the most familiar objects (people, trees, animals, houses, cars) but they are assembled in fresh, surreal, illogical juxtapositions that feel jumbled and overloaded. This is one of the most interesting tensions in his art, the push-pull between abstracting objects to simplified iconic shapes and complexifying the scene with too much imagery to grasp easily. Overladen as they are, the effect is to destroy any clear narrative. If asked to explain the story of what is happening in any Jose painting, meaning becomes slippery, and has to be made by the viewer, if at all. This situates his work as explic- itly postmodern, in the sense that the viewer must find and make meaning out of the work. e idea that a viewer is an essential participant for the future life of the artwork is common to all theorists, be they followers of aesthetic reception theory or the reader- response-criticism movement. In Jose’s art, this lack of overt narrative is also an invitation to the viewer, activating interest and curiosity. What he does exceptionally well is explore the friction between the realism manifest in painting a familiar object with spot-on accuracy (i.e. a green VW van) while sending other sections of the same image into ribbons of colorful abstraction and eye-blasting vibrant tones that create a sense of curious unreality.
The paintings do not directly evoke meaning, but rather suggest the hidden reality in emotion, a chance, a narrative. Therefore, his art will function as a matrix of the melancholic feeling amongst the audience who, despite having not experienced the events depicted, will be poetically invited to feel the nostalgia of moments belonging to their past.