Johan Galué is, above all, a great artist. His work indicates it. Conversing with him confirms it. Due to circumstances in his life, he spends part of his time working as a policeman in Maracaibo. Fortunately, for his own good, in administrative duties. He has received a lot of support from that institution in order to have time to paint, draw as well as to participate in the restoration of the frescoes in the Basilica of Our Lady of Chiquinquirá in Maracaibo. Looking at things this way, he is a very lucky man.
From his time as a student at the University of Zulia, he focused his training and interest in drawing. From there derive a large part of the characters that make up the thematic universe of his work. Many of these characters were treated in an almost hyper-realistic way, with a careful drawing in the details seen in the treatment of chiaroscuro in the volumes of the bodies, and, of course, in the faces. However, they were already inserted in diffuse contexts, remaining suspended or floating, indicating that truthfulness does not always exist in reality as we see and identify it. From then to the present, Johan establishes dislocated proportional relationships between figures and objects, a condition that persists in the dreams and inventions that he now presents.
His most recent work focuses precisely on this: on the presentation of dream worlds in which the imagination reigns. Johan points out that the images of him little come from the crude reality observed by the policeman, and rather come from associations that arise from the artist's daily practice. A practice that he performs with humility, in a permanent exchange of ideas with artist friends, poets and musicians from Maracaibo.
Working every day constantly generates new images for you. They tell stories both in the drawings and in the recent large-format paintings that he exhibits in Internal Realities, the exhibition that he currently presents at the Centro de Bellas Artes de Maracaibo. Each work has a narrative sense based on invention and the surreal, two constant qualities in the Zulian pictorial tradition. Johan assumes them and reworks them according to his own parameters, then, it is from the apparently illogical that a whole field of meanings operates in these paintings. Hence the presentation of dislocated characters, incongruous in their proportions or in the conformation of their anatomy. Characters and things appear floating or suspended in equally unreal settings.
Under this principle, it is worth highlighting some elements that are reiterated in these paintings. The first of these is violence. Many characters are headless or presented mid-torso "being alive." They rarely appear complete. They are alone or relating to others; sometimes tied to plants or things. They coexist among objects, in everyday environments such as their room or navigating in undefined spaces. Sometimes some of its parts are transfigured into something else - a hand in a shoe, for example - or it becomes vegetable or some formless, non-human mass. He also sometimes exaggerates his anatomical deformity when a character has three legs or, conversely, reduces a character's body-torso and limbs to a single arm. Any of these options focuses Johan's work on the human being as well as on experiential, torrid aspects of the human.
The imagination displayed in this way enables the interaction of these living-headless-transfigured beings with the dead. Sometimes ghostly beings appear cohabiting the same space. Either they are in the middle of skulls or in a field full of heads upside down.
They are magical situations that can be related to our Latin American cultural tradition. In this sense, Johan does not withdraw from his context but absorbs it and, based on his particular references, reinvents his own stories. With an interesting peculiarity: his characters, no matter how abrupt and informational they may be, are worked with subtlety and ingenuity.
This is visible in the touches - the luck of petals, drops or simple spots that float in space - as well as in the sometimes flat and synthetic treatment of many of these characters and objects that are barely outlined as silhouettes. The truth is that all this makes up the imaginary and introspective world of Johan Galué that, in the midst of his surreal nature, makes his plastic speech fill with meaning and solidity.
