Enter the home studio José Luis Mauri (Seville, 1931) is like taking a walk through his life. The walls are full of paintings from his different periods as a painter, but above all, from his life.
At the entrance, a document with the signature of Sister Angela de la Cruz. «I was born with an open palate and my grandmother lived very close to Sister Ángela, they were friends of hers and I knew her. She took me to see her. That was a year before her death, and she took me in her arms,” says the artist.
Along with this signed letter from Sister Ángela, many photos of her six children and grandchildren, “like a stream,” says the painter. A portrait of his daughter Araceli, who died in 2000, made by Carmen Laffonand a curious photo of Torcuato Luca de Tenafounder of the ABC newspaper, very young with his parents and sisters, one of them the painter’s wife’s great-grandmother.
This Thursday, May 2, it opens at Espacio Santa Clara a large exhibition of the artist that can be seen until September and which brings together more than 100 paintings.
Mauri, as he is known in the painting scene, has returned to his easel after a health downturn that he has overcome. «At my age I still paint every day. “That painting,” she says, pointing to a small landscape, “is the last thing I have done. Thank God my eyes do not fail me.
The easel presides over the space where some alcayatas appear in which paintings are missing. “They are in the exhibition,” he says. Juan Lacombacurator of the exhibition titled ‘José Luis Mauri, painter’, with a second epigram: ‘Have you painted today, José Luis? A day without painting is a day wasted’, “that’s the phrase my teacher always told me,” says Mauri.
For Juan Lacomba, «This is a well-deserved exhibition that has been long overdue. It was his turn and it has an anthological character. There are 116 pieces, of which 100 are from Mauri and the rest from the generational context, because it highlights his painting with respect to his generation. He tries to reveal where his pictorial life has gone, because he was trained at the age of 16 before entering the School of Fine Arts of Seville, where he enters and makes contact with Miguel Perez Aguilerahis teacher”.
Madrid and Paris
José Luis Mauri traveled to Madrid in 1953 because wins the Paular landscape scholarship and there he makes contact with Antonio Lopez, Lucio Muñoz, Feito… «Mauri was a young avant-garde at the age of twenty, and this is highlighted in this exhibition, his values were assumed, but had not been made explicit», emphasizes Juan Lacomba.
José Luis Mauri remembers that it was a friend of his mother who introduced him to painting. «Her name was La Saleta, she had British training and she taught me what painting was as an amateur. I would go to her house and they would make me copy English engravings. And then another friend of my mother took me to Fine Arts.
After his training and scholarship, José Luis Mauri Contracts arose in Paris and Madrid, “but no, I didn’t want to leave Seville. First, because the most important thing for me was my family and I missed Seville very much. Furthermore, I thought that Murillo painted here and why wouldn’t I paint?. And I didn’t leave”. He says that he has never regretted staying in Seville. «My true creation has been my family, above all. And my friends, I have very good friends. My wife always told me what did it matter to them that everyone loved me, and I didn’t do anything… », she says smiling.
After Paris he returns to Seville, and also makes a trip with Ignacio Burguillos for Italy. «the two on Vespa carrying the easels and paintings. We toured all of Italy. I have a precious memory of Assisi, and after Giotto, we went to see the chapel of Santa Clara, and lo and behold, I am now doing this exhibition in Santa Clara. She seems like my holy protector.
He has always felt very surrounded by the painters of his generation. In the interview there is another artist, Quino, who lends a hand and has also worked for this Santa Clara exhibition.
«Besides my teacher, Perez Aguilera, My friends have supported me, and they have even been painters who have organized many of my exhibitions, the first one I did was organized for me Joaquín Sáenz. My friends were also there Diego Ruiz Cortés, Burguillos…I remember that with Carmen Laffón we were going to paint in the river, on the rooftops and in the countryside. She was 13 or 14 years old and I was 16, and we were already painting together,” he recalls, smiling.
During the process of organizing the exhibition, Mauri confesses that the curator “he has discovered paintings that I did not remember having painted”. «It was a matter – says Lacomba – of putting Mauri in his place by finding the pieces with some urgency, because everything has been done in four months. I have had help from his family environment, and I have found very interesting pieces that describe the mentality of where he has gone. He has not been a naive painter, but rather an ingenuist with his reasons and his thesis, something that is seen in this exhibition.
In 1964, Mauri was already inserted in the national artistic debate with the exhibition he did at the Fortuny gallery in Madrid. Later she exhibited in collective exhibitions in the Biosca and Juana Mordó galleries, also in Madrid. “Mauri was a leading character in the sixties.”
The work of this painter is dispersed between Madrid, Seville, Cádiz and Huelva, which has been his territory. «In the theme there is a clear vocational decision towards the landscape. “He grew up in a garden in Heliópolis and has a very Cernudian relationship with the landscape, living the joy of existence in Nature,” says Lacomba.
José Luis Mauri smiles at the assessments of his colleague Lacomba. “The truth is that I have had a great time with my profession,” and as a professor of Natural Drawing, Quino says, “they were master classes.” «“I always told my students that I taught them to see, not to draw.”, explains the painter. “For Mauri the fundamental thing has been and is to paint every day and that gives him faith in the world and he gets excited about the things he paints.”
He is a painter whom everyone describes as “very Sevillian”, «not in the sense of light costumbrismo, because in their youth both Carmen Laffón and he went to Madrid to escape from that. He has not been a regionalist, but rather he has attended to the development of his own individuality, and he has always defended that,” says Lacomba, who is more than satisfied with the exhibition, “surprised by the category of painter he is.”
A 93 year old young man
With his young spirit of 93 years, he continues to go with friends, in this case with Quino, to paint in a studio in Tomares, the one that belonged to Félix de Cárdenas. «Doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc. paint there. I am very comfortable and if something happens to me, I have the doctor right there,” jokes the nonagenarian artist. “Everyone loves him”says Lacomba. «That sounds like Lola Flores to me. If you love me, leave,” laughs Mauri.
In the exhibition there is a desire for styles, something that is talked about in the catalogue. «José Luis has the courage and grace of directness, he is a contained expressionist, and that has a lot of personality. Already in the works from Paris, in 1958, you can see that defined personality, with international influences. He was in the debate on European painting of the Paris School of Modigliani, Utrillo, Matisse…, and it also has a somewhat existentialist stage. It has always been in its time. And then he returns to Seville and translates the world of suburban Paris to this city, coinciding with underdevelopment, the construction of Los Remedios, the Corta de Tablada, the gypsy cellar…, he draws the peripheral city. He had a non-aggrieved social look, but a descriptive one.”
For Juan Lacomba, To see Mauri’s painting is also to see the evolution of Seville. «I have tried to make it like that in the exhibition. Also in other authors such as Pérez Aguilera and Rodríguez Trujillo and others. Mauri captures the city in a tender and expressionist way,” she says.
At the time of the urban boom, it was the architects who bought the most work from him, “and also at the Biosca gallery they bought a lot of work from me for the national inns,” says Mauri.
The series have characterized the painter’s work, “but I return from time to time to the gardens of the Alcázar,” comments the artist, who cannot decide on any of his series, because he has painted more than a thousand paintings and always from life. «I have a lot of production because I have painted every day. If I see a detail that excites me, I paint it. I have no choice”.
They recently paid tribute to him and then presented a painting of him in the Alcalá de Guadaira museum, “and now the Santa Clara exhibition. “They’re going to kill me with emotions.”the painter jokes as he goes to the window and checks his colored pencils, the kind that reflect the light and the landscapes of Seville through his hands.
