The canons of beauty and the prevailing morality of each epoch have been questioned throughout history by artists who have confronted these ideal images with deformed mirrors. Italian mannerism, for example, subjected the Renaissance models to amateurish deformations that revealed a certain extenuation before these classical ideals. Although the Mannerists did not act deliberately against the established values, by subjectively imitating the mannerisms of Raphael or Michelangelo, they distorted the style of their predecessors.

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Present artists, like John Currin, continue to resort to mannerist distortions to parody rising aesthetic values such as thinness, youth and vacuous hedonism sponsored by fashion magazines. We bring up this American painter because we appreciate concordances with the work of art of Juan Palomares: both are inspired by the imagery of fashion magazines to transgress the idea of beauty and happiness that they want to sell us. And above all, both challenge the history of art with a contemporary language, destabilizing the spectator’s gaze and questioning him about the patterns established under the sign of elevated art and the genre of female nudity.

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Technical virtuosity allows Juan Palomares to dialogue with both old masters and the aesthetics of computer graphics, questioning these pictorial traditions and their influence on contemporary perception. Some of his female portraits seem to have been subjected to digital retouching, but they are pure oil paintings in which the artist resolves the collision between external appearance and psychological expression. What is disturbing about their paintings are not the subtle disproportions of their models but the way in which these disharmony makes them terribly attractive. Virtuality not only establishes new aesthetic canons but also forces the renegotiation of relations between representation and reality.

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Anna Adell