MY LOVE IS A FLOWER AND A CLOUD

Don Jesús's vocation for drawing and painting is a vocation of love. He declares it, and, looking at the work he has been producing over the past forty years, we can only see it confirmed. Faced with a violent and oppressive reality, he found refuge in the drawing of lines that mimic faces and objects, deforming them, playing with their sizes and proportions, weaving from the fragments of form and contours, shadows and transparencies, a world of color that, celebrating his monstrous propensity, conjures it up; like those who gather in costume to celebrate Carnival. It's not the daemons he represents; in his imitation, what he offers us is a talisman.

Don Jesús is meticulous in preparing his work table: it's a process halfway between ritual and routine. He arranges jars and brushes, papers and pencils, stands for a moment, making sure everything is in its place, and then sits down. He chooses one of the drawings he's been working on, examines it against the light, and then, as if something were telling him, he attacks it with measured and parsimony, abandoning himself to the grimy strokes of shadows, the dilution of watercolors and tempera, in an act brought to account day by day, transforming himself in its forms and proportions, in the pourings of colors that, equally saturated, dilute into nuances that, de-defining all contours, fill a festive marginalia full of intuitions and wonder.