José Luis Puche
José Luis Puche (SPAIN, 1976) has a PhD in art history. His career as an artist took off in 2005 when he held his first solo show in his home city. By 2008, just three years later, he was able to break into the international scene.
Drawing is the pivot around which his work revolves, and he evidences a truly astonishing technical skill in this field, considering that he is self-taught but perhaps also because of his uninhibited approach. As a draughtsman, his learning process is the slow result of a fierce determination from early childhood, and both his technical knowledge and stylistic evolution owe everything to the selective voracity of his gaze and the insistent exercise of the trained hand. In his mimetic drawings he uses the colors demanded by the drawing itself, sometimes just black and white, sometimes very colorful tones that catch the spectator's eye. The alleged emotional indifference of the color grey is offset in his work by a very physical touch of the pencil that turns the drawing into a passionate corporal dance. Equally clear is the artist's natural tendency to experiment with the materials up to the point, for example, of using oil-based charcoal to achieve a watercolor effect. His inclination to represent reality as fiction is plainly obvious. The exploration of reality that Puche practices ultimately elevates the value of the apparent to the status of real.
His works distinctly evoke uncertainty, generating a sense of disquiet. During his career, Puche has exhibited in prestigious venues like Centre Pompidou, CAC Málaga or the Sydney Opera House, where he was the only Spanish artist invited to take part in the group show 9 Hours Underground. He has also exhibited at fairs such as the YIA Art Fair (Paris) or the Basel Scope Art Show in New York and Switzerland. In the last few years, Puche has exhibited in Madrid and Palma de Mallorca, Brussels (Belgium) and hosted a solo show in Istanbul (Turkey).
He has also won several prizes and distinctions, including the lnternational Emerging Artists Award in 2016 (Dubai) and the first price of the International Art Award Manuel Ángeles Ortiz (Jaen University).
The actor and director Antonio Banderas commissioned him a solo project for the Caixabank Soho Theater, a mural of more than six meters, inaugurated at the end of 2019. He was the painter chosen by the Agrupación de Cofradías de Málaga to create the Easter 2020 poster. This poster was also presented at Fitur 2020 (Madrid). His creations could also be seen in September 2021 at the University of Jaen, Madrid and Córdoba.
Inaugurated last January the solo show 'The Legacy of Water' at the Olsen Gallery in Sydney.
