THE  CRITIQUE  THINKS ...

    Jose Arjonilla's work. The whole artist in the border of the figurative thing and the abstract thing. A world separates that catches and offers it. Skill contained and message. New circles; quite very worked with finds of suggest chromatism or, in other linens, he applies many matter to achieve, maybe, cosmic or astral effects. Nets meshes after which he shows us a new light.

    Arjonilla achieves the bigger wisdom of its exhibition with the work "Agony of the tree", which presents the whole pathos of a human look. Ecological singing.

Gonzalo Fausto. DIARY EL SOL, Malaga - Spain, 7 December 1989

… Abstract it is the result, but it is necessary to tint its development, in which there is guessed multitude of concepts that fight to go out on the outside and taking form of a linen, the idea - Painting to be done-; something that is indeed the singular virtuality of the creative artist who defines its activity towards the not evidently realistic formulations to which he loads of intellectual content.

    This it is Jose Arjonilla's case that can mask in these abstractions vivacious outbreaks of real figures, but that must appear in this moderate simulation that allows that the artist should act with bigger singularity and with absolute freedom. There are figures and there is symbolism in these figures because it seems that the ghosts, the illusion and the allegoric content of the sample needs a few vestments distant in order that the performance of the recipient centres on the final formulation and they are at the time the tones, the forms, the spot and its derivations of colour, the chromatic mixings, which catch its spirit

    The ideas are those who express the effervescent content and the naturalness of the work created with so many personality and with the bigger attention to the meaning. What happens is that the artist has could unify content and continent in a proof of which he can adjust with moderation its work in order that they connect form and fund.

Jose Mayorga. DIARIO SUR, Malaga - Spain, 8 December 1989

… In the set of its work it is possible to estimate, on the one hand, a few compositions conceived well, though they need excessive space for its contemplation, for other one, a few very well finished figures where its worry resides now in the persons and its relations with a profusion of the warm colours that buried to the colds to the second plane. The time has sweetened its aggressiveness that now glimpses buried behind the constant overlapping of the figures with an acceptable skill of transparencies. The magic world in which he is situated immersed stops to guess an emotive load of feelings that tries as give her form and colour: loves driven to despair of movies of black cinema of dawn, illusions that have been left in the way with fantastic prominent figures and of science fiction, the injustice expressed with the national holiday…, concluding, all prominent figures historical that will never occupy an eminent place in the future of the land, which has not been its step.

Antonio J. Navajas. EL SOL DEL MEDITERRANEO, Malaga - Spain, 28 April 1991     

     Proceeding from his shared intimacy, Jose Arjonilla comes to Malaga, where he presents his last creations. The tense years of searches of his own one stay to do, of his own expression: the border among past and beyond.

    His images are illusions of the reality, a reality fills of meaning that exceeds the line of the imagination.

    His figures devoid of mobility, they prove to be distant: they have overcome its time and analyse its own intimacy.

    The colour overcomes the border that frames the reality, a reality imagined, dreamed, very different from the commonness, being fused with the proper structure where it is sustained.

    Arjonilla with his powerful originality, he extracts everything from his interior, creating with colours and forms an exterior aspect that is the fundamental content of his compositions. 

    Now renewed and modified: present, future and past; he knows where begins and finishes everything but proving to be, at the same time, unforeseeable. Everything flows as the ruts of his linens, transforming the images but without affecting his fundamental deep unit that identifies them. There exists always the continued way that goes up to the final process.

    Arjonilla has found his proper language of plastic expression.

Manuel Vargas Montiel. Licensed in Fine Arts, June 1991 

    The lot that visions in the sample integrates productions of last three years, and in it, there are done visible the changes that not only affect the aesthetic model, but the proper textures achieved by means of tecnique of dissolution, oils of treated base or pure acrylic. For the above mentioned thing, this work represents a proof of effective lesson of work and witness, of hard delivery.

    I would not be able say if the figurative thing appears as weariness of the abstract total formula from which the painter comes or if, on the contrary, it is the logical consequence of the crossed way. Of all forms - Arjonilla has experimented with new matters, has penetrated into the possibilities of his resources and has could extract the sufficient plastic experience. It is enough for the future …

Julian Sesmero. DIARY SUR, Malaga – Spain, 24 June 1991

    Jose Arjonilla liberates his creative force investigating with the form, the colour and the materials. His plastic spirit is abstract, but he doesn’t want to give up introducing in his key pictures of an imagination in which the presence of the figure humanizes is domineering, and he reveals us his draftsman's undoubted qualities.

    In works as "The defeat", "The intrigue" or "The wait" he manages to communicate these feelings across gestures and enigmatic silhouettes. The worn out surfaces of the linens - as ruts that arise from the sand or of the powder of marble on which the oil seats - they help to create this determinant environment that the artist wants to transmit, beside identifying his work.

    Arjonilla, to his long formation as draftsman, he has managed to join his passion for discovering new forms of expression with matters foreign to the painting. The sample that now he presents to the public is the result of years of search of an proper style, and it seems that he has obtained it.

Maria Jose Carmona. Licensed in Fine Arts. Critique of Art, January 1993

    The self-taught search of his artistic way Jose Arjonilla initiates it in an abstract luminous and passional expressionism; now he finds his pictorial maturity in a series where he joins, with order and harmony, abstraction and imagination by means of a mixed tecnique.

    Artworks as "From Allah's garden" make real his more intuitive aesthetic sensations: red and lands are harmonized in extensive waves of consistent texture, generating quasi-organic figures in vivacious attitude, which fight to deny the smoothness of the linen. At the same time, these seas of waves introduce us, playing always with an emotive human figure, in the capricious and unreal world of a dream, in works as "Captivity". Definitively, this continue practice of formal possibilities looks as to have opened a route of investigation of creative freedom.

Maria Elena Algaba Hidalgo.  Licensed in Fine Arts, March 1993

    We ignite the light not to see what stalks us in the darkness and, in effect, we stop seeing it, but what stalks us continues there, and it, precisely, seems to constitute the interest of the painter José Arjonilla in the pictures that form a part of the first individual exhibition that the artist presents in Madrid.

    Arjonilla uses a few technical procedures that adjust so well to the exasperating "topics" of his pictures that turns out to be easy to create in contemplatively this, simultaneously acute and diffuse, sensation of suffocation in which they immerse some nightmares. A kind of endless organic labyrinth, in which every form is subsidiary of each and every of the others, does that the look "travels" with authentic uneasiness across from the different compositions, being detained to the end in the personal evocation and individual of an experience that we share. 

    And when the look manages to be detained, we find works constructed with intelligence, as "Conclusion III", in my opinion one of the best, with a tonal impeccable atmosphere and a composition in its point.

Carmen Pallares.  ABC DE LAS ARTES, Madrid – Spain, 18 January 1993

    When of among the shades of the dream there arise enigmatic alleys, which lead us to the tubular landscape of our surroundings and there, among apparent unreal images, we verify that we have come to the centre of our sleep conscience, then it happens that or we wake up pulled down, claiming the unbearable tangibility of a reality that weighs us, or, on the contrary, we enter in the labyrinth of our inconformity and discover that everything what has been given us is not even true not better, not more passable than the solidity of the darkness into which we have got.

    Arjonilla has the value to not flee before the certain thing, distressingly certain in be knowing among the transparent gratings of a being that, if it is named to himself and he names the world, verifies that here only we still have the struggle, though the defeat is his more certain end, or the recreation of the individual, though this one is asphyxiated in the controversy of his own or mentally ill obsessions.    

    And it is that Arjonilla - painter's big hands that sculpts (or he slaps), dreamer's deep look that lights his mysteries, word changes of whom shouts in the silence of his rebelliousness -  knows that there is no another way that of dreaming I wake up and to name, to name without fear the indescribable thing and to make ourselves naked before our mirrors, to do see that only in us themselves lies the truth of our more intimate longings.

Ignacio Caparros. Writer. Prologue Catalogue Exhibition, Madrid – Spain, May 1993

… This complete joint reaffirms what in the previous occasion we verify that the colour matters very much for the author of the works and that the pasta, very abundant and ready well, is capable for yes same of completing the suggestions of the laborious artist. In these two dimensions, colour and matter, an offer arises which in occasions reveals the born graphics that exists in the painter and in others, his capacity stops to design changeable and juxtaposed structures in which distant lapel figurative iconography.

Julian Sesmero. DIARIO SUR, Malaga – Spain, 7 June 1994

… His work of abstract trend, with the slightest allusions to the imagination that remains suggested among his sinuous forms, comes from interior argumentations. His compositions arranged by criteria that we know, they are converted into labyrinths of infinite curves treated with graphemes changed. Arjonilla knows the resource of grapheme with that he enriches his surfaces stamping a character determined to every creation. The colour inside the harmonic scales and the pasta typical of his material creations, they are both elements on which the artist relies to argue an history.

A.B. Montesinos. DIARY LEVANTE, Valencia – Spain, 13 June 1996

… The contemplation of the work of this artist of Jaen suggests multiple readings in view of his opposite character between the abstract thing and the figurative thing. From the mathematical point of view, more specifically "topologic" we are before a surface development which process involution tends to occupy the space three-dimensional but without never managing to do it totally. This unattainable search of the volume is the one that gives to Arjonilla's work this sensation of expectant uneasiness. 

Galiana. DIARIO 16, Valencia – Spain, 19 June 1996

… If the cubism had been curved and sinuous and had adjusted more to the constant development that to the strict decomposition you had had probably this formulation, which in itself moves away enough of known canons to establish the whole series of own manifests.

    We are in an analysed but totally integrated and united space, in which the limits of the fund aren’t established as support of the composite ordination, but as active element of contrast that is opposed constant to the figure, relying on dynamical proper characters that they intermingle with the motive, creating a worrying ambiguity, which again appeals to this physical materiality, not always valuably visually and that we can find in the air that it wraps us, optical relief definite good …

Amparo Molina Gonzalez. DIARIO DE CORDOBA, Cordova – Spain,  21 November 1997

 … The work of a praised labour; it is possible that, as some critics say, it moves inside a line of abstraction or maybe it is of the expressionism, cubism - tubism or surrealism - are glimpsed precedents of some works of Fernand Leger and Max Ernst - but not the one other one is not even accidental; Jose elaborates each of his works with a deep calculated criterion, looking in every accomplishment of his graphemes for an undulating harmony that suggests forms, he defines others, connects and alternates paces in which he leaves a door opened to the visual creativity of the observer, textured the surface with a material concretion …

… Entering the Jose Arjonilla's artistic world is to look for a lack of definition, can not be classified inside the known styles, not in the movements of forefront: Arjonilla is a deep artist who shows his feelings of an original form constructed in his graphismaterial and chromatic with big dose of creativity.

Andres Quesada Clavijo. Licensed in Fine Arts. Professor. Cordova – Spain, December 1997 

 … The Jose Arjonilla Migal's pictorial work has been defined by many critics of art with appellative very diverse that grant great prestige to him. Qualified of replete work of tecnique, content and message, they place it in the border of the figurative thing and the abstract thing.

    The sinuous forms, the suggested chromatics of his works come from an argumentation interior, very related to the musicality. Sample of it they are, for example, some of the works that, presented under the   suggested titles " Of The Fleming and You Sing Others ", " Melody in Sun ", " Melody in Me " or "Sevillian", between others, they suggest sorceress and honorific harmony loaded with great motivation and enriched with good dose of creativity.

Matilde Gomez. IDEAL DE JAEN, Jaen - Spain, 5 February 1998                    

… Some critiques have spoken about one "Plasticity of The Physical Thing" of "Labyrinthine Abstraction", of “Between The Figurative and The Abstraction” seeing we a "Surrealistic Figurative Art" that in some topics becomes obvious more and in others it is diluted in the unreal thing. 

    The present sample has a great unit, thematic unit and chromatic unit where the light and the colour give a very personal vision of the work, in some with marked character tenebrous as universal beginning of the painting.

    A few curved, baroque forms that lead a space with fund where sometimes an architectural support appears, a chequer work of blue rollers or simply a secret fund for the conglomeration of the forms. The material and clear texture in the tables intervenes favouring to the work and them bringing over to the spectator …

Juan Vicente Corcoles.  DIARY JAEN,  Jaen – Spain, 5 February 1998

    In a frame which there is fused of paradigmatic way the impersonal, unknown, free thing opened to the whole world as Internet, Jose Arjonilla Migal shows his work continuing a proper way towards the mysterious depth of the art.

    The artist appears in the latter year with something so specially as are the icons which add to his work without leaving of the personal way. This time he achieves a substantial jump transforming the magic - religious essence into round and physical actions - manifestations.

    Arjonilla transfigures and leads the peculiar art of the icon to a spiritual expression in where the lyric figures emerge very sensitive and easily perceptible imaginations.

    José Arjonilla's icons are of ideal nature in the measurement in which the identical thing takes part of the divine reality, representing the transcendent corporealness and sustenance of meditation, tending to fix the spirit on the image, which transports and concentrates it on the presence that it symbolizes. These icons, as all of them, are a window opened between the land and the sky, but being opened in both senses.

    The work of the creator that now introduces us, makes possible that an almost religious language how is the language of the icons for definition, is reduced to a support or palpable matter. This produces a language round, related to the space more than with any another possibility of message. His icons thrill to any educated look.

Eduardo Arboleda Ballen. Writer and Critic of Art INTERNET, August 2000

      The Arjonilla´s paintings propose an emphatic meeting with the irritated dynamism. Holder of a polished tecnique, he applies his wittingly in an occupation curvilinear and connected in tubular volumes that cut ensemble, they super put and juxtapose in an almost mathematical exercise of constant pace. The formal structure guards a classification that sometimes interrupts the curves and enters them, including balanced and suggested sets. Highly enigmatic work in which a voluptuous and baroque sensuality is breathed, connecting the surrealism and the abstraction in a voluminous spectacle on the flat support of the work, achieving that this one parts with the same one and strolls to its broad ones in the endless labyrinth of the plastic materializations.

Angel Mason. Prologue Catalogue Exhibition, Madrid - Spain, November 2000

      The man possesses an innate taste for the search of family, recognizable modals, for that one who makes feel him comfortably having assumed it as acquaintance. Of this form, he approaches to the figuration, while direct modal of his daily knowledge, and of it this forms also dives in the literary of the pictorial story. Nevertheless, this search of nearby modals does not limit itself to the world of the figurative representation, but it goes farther, introducing in the own language of the abstraction. Since this way it is possible to understand certain abstraction that escapes of the fictitious, non-existent orthogonal in the sensitive reality and only present in the purely rational mind of the artist, and that enjoys itself in the organic curve to develop in all his brilliance, a type of abstraction that artists as Jose Arjonilla cultivate with total dedication.

    This Andalusian artist separates in his works an elaborated system of geometric, curved, undulating forms, of almost organic reminiscences, constructed based on faeces of parallel, flamboyant and sinuous lines. And this way he obtains a series of compositions moved, of volumes in displacement, of masses linked of impossible forms, which remind certain surrealist precedents for its distant organization. And this way he obtains also a series of tubular projections continued in the space, and it is an analytical certification of the form curls, a study detailed of the pace and of the dynamic composition. Two referential very nearby fountains from that being able to drink without fear of losing the authentic course of his painting.

Carlota de Alfonso. EL PUNTO DE LAS ARTES, Madrid – Spain, 17  November  2000

   The lyric bet of Arjonilla lead us to the deep background of morphology of the form. They are beings born in the plane, but of exacerbated, insolent, waving, musical, consistent, harmonic, sculptoric dynamism also very well balanced as regards colour, concept, and forms. Arjonilla is a serious, studious, perfectionist artist, absorbed in his work in its multiple variations and compasses. The analysis of it impregnates us of long paths that raise and lower and play and are embraced in volumetric and tubular modulations assembled in endless sectionings and ways of rich chromatism.

    He paints luminous works with multiple centres of light, diversified in constant and vital metamorphosis, metabolisms that become alive in trembling connections of continuous sequences.

    This is a peculiar creator that uses his own language. You catch his own style at first sight, although his formal structuring is based on death throes of abstract surrealism, sometimes compensated with quadratic backgrounds providing order, balance and serenity. They are disquieting and elaborate forms, perennial clusters catched just at the instant of the right mutation, on a plastic miracle.

    A sentient and methodical artist, he masters technique and uses it with extreme virtuosity and improbable limits, offering with generosity a mature, personal, coherent, rich and exuberant work to us.

    Among his ample creative abilities, Arjonilla is developing brilliantly his bests and is offering us as a present his magical formal amplitude and his innate originality.

Angel Mason. REVISTART, BARCELONA Spain, November 2000

    With satisfaction we presented you a sample of José Arjonilla's work, painter of Andujar (Jaen), an excellent artwork himself that it moves between the figurative thing and the abstract thing. Firm lines and balanced colours stand out in these paintings, in where multitude of figures they reveal us  suggested since volutes of smoke to interlace, to the time, and to form a world of powerful allegories. When the art is born of inside ..., it breaks the chains of the soul. 

Pedro Martinez. ALMIAR, Virtual magazine, Internet. May 15, 2002

    A few years ago Jose Arjonilla discovered in the abstraction an unusual territory of investigation inside which they were taking shape strange and dense forms which today are turned into a personal language absolutely. A relevant role played then the thick and warm matter, the made pigment texture its own pace acquired dancer while the colour was guaranteeing its presence in spaces broken by the serpent ante to flow luminously. One produced symbiosis to itself of harmonies unsuspected between the watery funds and the tubular waves floating on them, being born like that the universe of these abstract modulations, loaded with organic resonance. The Jose Arjonilla's current works are a continuation matured of that complex scheme and at the same time essentially, enriched with new material nuances, forming a suggest plastic studding as ductile as the same creatures    crept and invertebrate that often evokes us. Fascinating submarine depths inhabited by cavernous, folded viscosities, twisted in a tangle of constant outlines in whose confusion is neither beginning nor possible final, Jose Arjonilla seems to want to recover the origins of the life appealing to the enigmatic appearance still as larva in the dark interior of these trodden nodules, persistently caught in the dynamics peristaltic of its worrying transformed nature. The tactile game of the mass and the emptiness, the lights and the shades, creates volumes that advance or move back in the surface of the support, testing an endless number of visual effects of enormous plastic force. Across this effective pictorial analysis, Arjonilla manages to enter with the look a labyrinthine territory transforming illusorily the plane of the picture into three-dimensional area that us it looks like to want to devour.

    Jose Arjonilla (Andujar, 1954) is from always a great lover of the painting, the poem and the music. He began to paint of self-taught form when child, showing soon excellent endowments for the drawing. After dealing studies of painting in Barcelona, he celebrates his first individual one at the end of the eighties, being at present one of the important artists of the plastic Andalusian panorama. He has celebrated exhibitions for the whole Spain, selected besides in several contests of painting. His(its) work is represented in several Museums and Foundations of Spain…

Amalia Garcia Rubi. El Punto de las Artes Madrid – Spain. 17 May 2002

    I have had to come to London, to return after so many years, for to recapture old and personal reflections on the permanent revolution of the plastic arts: from the monochrome sketch in a prehistoric cavern (term that only indicates that at the time had not been invented the history) up to the seventeen million colours of the computer, it looks like that had passed only a few instants from the arrogant and auto sufficient perspective of this third millennium, but, nevertheless, centuries of dreams, technologies and experimentation become condensed in the works that has hung, before me, in the white walls (as if they were using as fund to a great web of thousands of colours) as the "Lewisham Art House", a room of art that, certainly, former was a library.

    The regulation of the works in the exhibition dismantles the hackneyed old man of painting versus photography since the works happen in studied regulation, with harmony. I incline for beginning the visit walking towards my left side and I find José Arjonilla's oils, abstract painter though not only of the abstract thing, so of between road surface and elaborated outlines of these paintings they emerge suggested figures that, since columns of smoke, interlace to form a world of powerful allegories; the vivacious, round, balanced colours arise from specially elegant funds. 

Pedro Martinez, MARGENCERO.COM, May 2002