Verde de sapén, 1990

I think football affected my sense of colour, I think that game contains much beauty, the colour of the shirts, the green of the grass when played at night, the emblems.

JOSÉ GUERRERO

Azul añil, 1989

Guerrero’s work in the nineties is not a skillful, astute reworking of the already known, but a celebration of the properties of painting, a transformation of colour into form, where the process of perception is much slower, and where we understand the importance that the emotional nature of space and the physical process of creating it acquires in his work.

MARÍA DE CORRAL

Oferta con rojo, 1988

The space Guerrero has always painted is very enigmatic despite its simplicity. It is based on a very slight tension between background and foreground that is immediately corrected by colour, sometimes a dominant colour, creating a single, but profound layer, or, at least, one with a vanishing point basically marked by more or less relaxed, more or less open brushstrokes.

SANTIAGO B. OLMO

 

José Guerrero puts into his pictures what courses through his veins and bursts onto the canvas. His painting can be explained in all its humanity by this very concentration, as can be sensed in his manner (…)

JOSÉ LUIS FERNÁNDEZ DEL AMO

Cuenca, 1986

(…) very large, panoramic formats in which he unfolds a peculiar vision of the landscape as a chromatic spectacle. Obviously, there is a grandiosity, imposed by the dimensions (…) and, although the structure responds to the basic principles of his work of the late seventies and eighties, these are really works where the best of Guerrero lies.

SANTIAGO B. OLMO

Verde oliva, 1979

Most of those pictures must have been painted on the floor, and the brushstrokes, which can be seen within the masses of colour, were applied along parallel directions, with short movements of the arm, avoiding the circular scientism that produces curves on the canvas.

JUAN ANTONIO RAMÍREZ

Litoral, 1979

Colours – they tighten their enclosures and on reaching the end of their littoral, everything becomes imprisoned, that is where the spaces, the lines end, that is where the pulse lies.

JOSÉ GUERRERO

 

Presence of Black, 1977

Today, in my studio, on opening a tube of violet, it fell onto the floor. It burst (I was working on two pictures on the floor), the cap flew off, made a line and ran onto the second picture – the trajectory made me see another line. This is most interesting for me, because for years I have been joining spaces which, although separate, come together due to some general force, and not in every picture. I’d even say it is like a mechanism of (lines or shapes) that multiply, that assist each other, the colour comes and goes, mingling like the clouds, like the waves mingle with the sand and fall back again, but there is always this energy.

JOSÉ GUERRERO

Expansión azul, 1976

After a few days of anguish and frustration, I broke up all these spaces on the canvas and resolved this group of pictures that I thought I would call “Expansion”. It was as if I were throwing out everything that did not belong to me and leaving what my intuition told me. That tension is established in different parts of the picture, some lines tend to stretch the shapes, and the picture, with its four clean sides, opens up this new series for me.

JOSÉ GUERRERO

Enlace, 1975

His painting had reached the same degree of mastery as his life. He had resolved harshness, anguish and loss, and dissolved contentedly, serenely, into his legendary classicism.

FRANCISCO BAENA

Saliente, 1974

It is not obvious, but the idea is interesting – the simplicity of his pictures and the chromatic economy return us to the spare constructions of pictorial space such as we find in Sánchez Cotán. By using a dominant colour Guerrero seems to reconstruct a still life like those of Sánchez Cotán, but emptied of objects, vegetables, fruit and animals; there only remains a resonant, allusive space of imprecise depth.

SANTIAGO B. OLMO