The landscape iconographies of cubist and indigenous influence that bring together version 2.1 of this pictorial series by JJ Melián Santana are exhibited in Maspalomas until July 25
The painter calls for the restoration and landscape protection of the capital's famous Cliffs. “They are being destroyed,” he says.
Until July 25, Maspalomas will host a new exhibition of the pictorial series 'Riscos de Colores' by José Javier Melián Santana from Gran Canaria.
The exhibition, inaugurated on June 27 by the second deputy mayor and councilor responsible for the area of Education and Culture, Elena Álamo Vega, is made up of around thirty paintings. They are a 2.1 version of the creative theme on invented constructive landscapes that she already offered in this municipality and also in the Municipal Art Center itself in December 2023, although now expanded with new representations.
The artist's technique, a draftsman by profession and a decorator and painter by vocation, is specialized in the use of acrylic on recycled pallet wood. They are provided to him by his brother-in-law who supports his environmental awareness and practice of recycling everything possible. The painter recognizes that it is a much cheaper material than common canvas and that, as a color support, it offers a different dimension to each piece.
The works “are something peculiar because they are made with acrylic paint on recycled pallet wood, sanded and treated with a transparent protector against heat so that they can even be hung on the terraces,” says JJ Melián, who has lived and painted for a long time in an apartment in Maspalomas.
Like the previous initial series, the exhibition is inspired by the joyful chromatic-landscape polysemy that marked his childhood during the late '70s and early '80s of the last century in the San Nicolás neighborhood of the Gran Canaria capital. She recognizes that her childhood life was spent going back and forth between the two houses of her grandmothers (Lala and Teresa) which were at the beginning and end of Traviesa Street, “in a neighborhood of earthy, cubic and colored houses, with spectacular views.” impressive to the neighboring cliffs of San Roque and San Juan and the entire lower city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.”
Colors of childhood
Melián Santana confirms that his paintings “do not represent any specific place,” and that they are an abstraction of the architectural and colorful iconography that littered the landscape of his childhood. However, in this new expanded version we can also see “the influence of the cliffs of colorful houses from other places in the Archipelago and the world, especially in the Mediterranean area such as the Greek islands and the Balearic Islands,” he admits. That landscape with a cubist look in which the sea and the fishing neighborhoods stand out has taken over his work, in which a certain influence of Canarian indigenous painters such as Felo Monzón, Jane Millares Sall and Santiago Santana Díaz can also be seen, just as recognizes the painter himself.
The exhibition is also, according to its author, a wake-up call to those who must ensure the preservation of the landscape and architectural wealth of the capital's urban planning. “Today the Riscos are no longer what they were. Many of the homes are falling down, discolored, in a process of unstoppable deterioration and destruction, as if there was no love or respect for one's own," says JJ Melián.
This exhibition arrives in San Fernando de Maspalomas after previously passing through Gáldar and Vecindario. Here, as there, the painter introduces a representative iconographic representation of the municipality into the exhibition. In this case it is once again a surprising illustration of the Maspalomas Lighthouse and Las Dunas. Already in the 2023 exhibition he was forced to make up to six different versions of the same pictorial motif given the high demand he received from spectators, especially from tourists who wanted to have a beautiful souvenir of their time in the city at a modest price. Maspalomas.
