The lush, bravura paintings of Spanish artist Jorge Galindo move between gestural abstraction and figuration, incorporating elements of collage. The painter, who lives and works in Porto, Portugal, has described his expressionistic style as “dirty pop.” In Galindo’s hands, this idiom brings together various chapters of twentieth-century painting—the collage of synthetic cubism, the aggressive and immediate brushwork of Willem de Kooning, and the commodity critique and juxtaposition of Haim Steinbach—as well as the Renaissance genre of still life. In the early 1990s, Galindo studied with Julian Schnabel in the Círculo de Bellas Artes workshops in Madrid; there, he made paintings inspired by Dadaists, especially Hannah Höch, as well as paintings that integrated photomontages of images sourced from midcentury printed materials. In 1996, he introduced swaths of colored and patterned fabrics into his abstractions with his Patchwork paintings; and his first figurative series, Pintura animal (1999), features kitsch-like renderings of hybrid canine creatures bathed in dramatic splatters and drips of paint.
In 2009, Galindo embarked on the floral paintings for which he is best known. Inspired by Henri Fantin-Latour’s painting A Basket of Roses as it appeared on the cover of New Order’s 1983 album Power, Corruption & Lies, he began painting flowers based on images sourced from antique postcards he’d found at flea markets. Ten years later, he returned to the subject matter for the Flores de periferia paintings, a collaboration with filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. These works are based on a series of small format photographs Almodóvar took of “peripheral” flowers—those that grew in the margins of train tracks—arranged in vases. Galindo’s recent work conjoins and layers commercial, mechanically reproduced images of flowers—in the form of sampled wallpaper or silkscreened ephemera—with expressive impressions of blooms painted in confident gestural brushstrokes. Brimming with painterly incident, these canvases engage myriad styles and methods to emphasize the resounding potential of the blossom to signify as well as its unflagging affinity for metaphor.
In 2009, Galindo embarked on the floral paintings for which he is best known. Inspired by Henri Fantin-Latour’s painting A Basket of Roses as it appeared on the cover of New Order’s 1983 album Power, Corruption & Lies, he began painting flowers based on images sourced from antique postcards he’d found at flea markets. Ten years later, he returned to the subject matter for the Flores de periferia paintings, a collaboration with filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. These works are based on a series of small format photographs Almodóvar took of “peripheral” flowers—those that grew in the margins of train tracks—arranged in vases. Galindo’s recent work conjoins and layers commercial, mechanically reproduced images of flowers—in the form of sampled wallpaper or silkscreened ephemera—with expressive impressions of blooms painted in confident gestural brushstrokes. Brimming with painterly incident, these canvases engage myriad styles and methods to emphasize the resounding potential of the blossom to signify as well as its unflagging affinity for metaphor.
