The painter and sculptor from Cieza José Lucas, the poet of color who said that no one should go to bed without reading Juan Ramón Jiménez, died this Monday at the Gregorio Marañón hospital in Madrid due to complications derived from respiratory failure after a fall. He was 77 years old. Last Wednesday he suffered an accident that caused a broken hip that was fatally complicated. Antonio and María Lucas, children of the tireless creator, who was working these days on the murals of the new Chamartín station, confirmed his death to LA TRUTH. By express wish of the artist there will be no funeral, and his ashes will be deposited in the family pantheon in the Cieza cemetery.
A few hours before the incident, Lucas was very grateful that the newspaper had deposited one of his works, ‘Primavera’, as part of Vocento’s legacy in the Caja de las Letras del Instituto Cervantes. That work illustrated the first series of tributes in Ababol to the poets of the Generation of ’27 for the centenary of the Literary Supplement (1923-1926) of LA VERDAD. «For me it is a great honor, and it is even more so because that work illustrated the cover of the weekly Ababol dedicated to one of my favorite poets, the Nobel Prize winner in Literature from Moguer», whose verses I considered «like the oracle», because with them , Lucas said, reaches the category of sublime poet. One of his favorite poems was ‘Eternidades’, where Juan Ramón Jiménez says “intelligence, give me the exact name of things.”
Man with a clear volcanic component (“I cannot do anything that is not with all the essence of the volcanic, with all the force of the igneous”), recognized for his expressionist edges (he discovered the expressionists in Germany thanks to a scholarship ) and grotesque, José Lucas was a poet with the brush and the hammer. He boasted of being the painter who best knew the Spanish poets. In his last interview in this newspaper, published in January of this year, on the occasion of the inauguration of the series of tributes to the Literary Supplement, Lucas recalled that Juan Ramón Jiménez spent his entire life polishing his work: «He never considered it finished . A fine, exquisite polish, on a very extensive and intense poetics. He glorifies everything he touches. “Wherever you go, the world changes.” Ciezano’s lyrical vein with form and material eternally passed on to his son, Antonio Lucas, journalist for El Mundo and one of the most forceful and heartfelt lyrical voices in contemporary Spanish poetry.
José Lucas, born in Cieza in 1945, developed most of his artistic career in Madrid. Among his most recognized projects are the murals at the Chamartín railway station in Madrid, which since the 70s have welcomed millions of travelers, a tribute to poets such as Quevedo, San Juan de la Cruz, Rilke, Mallarmé, Rimbaud , García Lorca or Vicente Aleixandre; or those located at the El Carmen de Murcia station, on the Paseo and the Church of Santa Clara de Cieza, or in the Oasis urbanization of Los Alcázares. Among his largest sculptures, the ‘Tribute to the Poets’ stands out, in Murcia, at the intersection between Avenida de Alicante and Avenida Miguel Indurain, a donation from the brothers Tomás, José and Juana Fuertes to the city of Murcia, with a weight of 35,000 kilos and a height of 20 meters, an artistic adventure made a reality in the workshops of Pepe Monserrate. “I hope it is possible that it can continue to be enjoyed some centuries after ours,” Lucas said in 2008 on the occasion of the inauguration. «It is not intended to be a hymn to Murcia, nor to tell any story about our land, because I do not tolerate art being pigeonholed into that disgusting and repugnant thing of local nationalisms, of which I am a fierce enemy. And I am, among other things, because they restrict the freedom of any creator and any person who aspires to be free. Freedom of creation was one of his workhorses.
Enemy of mediocrity and selfishness, militant of contradiction as the only method for personal and professional growth, music lover to the point of being sick (“he listened to music while drawing, at least fourteen hours a day”), compulsive reader of newspapers, “re-reader” permanent support of half a dozen very great writers”, fierce and fearsome in the use of words, enemy of charlatans and idiots, he was capable of entering and emerging unscathed from any storm.
His ‘Minotaur’ heart [así se llamaba una de sus exposiciones más celebradas, a la que dos compositores contemporáneos, Miguel Franco y Antonio Narejos, pusieron música en un disco para RTVE, con apoyo de la Obra Social de la CAM] he softened with the nobility of art well understood. Selective in his affections, a friend of the Café Gijón gatherings, Pepe Lucas was generous in sharing his most intimate experiences and feelings, giving flights in his studios in Madrid and Mazarrón to all of his temperamental and transgressive whims. Many of them starred in exhibitions throughout Spain, and appeared in catalogues, books, posters and newspapers. In his work, as he recognized, there was a lot of “accident, chance, finding things that I was not looking for.” His first exhibition was in Granada in 1967, and throughout his career he received important awards and recognitions.
What was there about poetry in your painting? «It is not the adventure of color nor is it the form: the poetic feeling is the most lyrical thing in me. No matter how painter he is, if there is no poetic feeling, everything else is of no use. You have to look for the dimension and invisible meaning that they have in things. The invisible aroma. I spend my life painting, looking for the poetic, and also the prosaic, the epic… I look for everything with painting, because it is the means I have to express myself, and it is the flashlight that helps me illuminate to find something beyond the poetic, beyond the human and the divine. Painting is an adventure, and poetry, a true chimera. “I am not looking for beauty but for a miracle,” she admitted to LA TRUTH in her last interview.
José Lucas was in the chimera of the unknown, in the chimera of the impossible and in the chimera of that which had not yet been said or painted. “I’m sure I won’t make it,” he said, modulating his voice until it was untranslatable. “But as long as I live, I will look for him.” Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s work ‘The altarpiece of envy, lust and death’ inspired one of his most praised pictorial adventures, ‘The altarpiece of lust’, which he was able to show at the end of the 90s at the Palacio Almudí Art Center in Murcia, and later in Alicante. “In ‘The Altarpiece’ the material it represents is so immaterial that the creator, the painter, feels swept away, and transported, from the origin of creation,” wrote art critic Miguel Logroño. «A creator (painter, architect, poet, musician…), what he has to have apart from his more or less developed training is an attitude towards the world. You cannot understand creation or the man who creates it without an attitude toward life. And that attitude is made up of successes and failures, of contradictions, of more or less conflicting and bordering situations,” Lucas once acknowledged in conversation with Juan Antonio Molina.
We also remember his tributes to Buñuel and Valle-Inclán, his set and costume design for Benavente’s ‘The Created Interests’ directed by José Tamayo at the Teatro de Bellas Artes in Madrid, his architecture of water and smoke, his float for the sardine group Marte, and its posters for bullfights, for the Cante de las Minas, for the Murcia Fair… He who was a disciple of the sculptor and painter Juan Solano could be satisfied with his findings, but, without a doubt, he What could make him most proud was the evolution of his friends on that path of search. Nothing could move him like recognizing in others the clear and conscious gaze of where one is, where one is walking, and, above all, where one does not want to go.
What was your life balance? «My level of agreement with what I have created so far is minus ten, and I hope to reach at least minus fifty at least. I am not going to stop painting, and always from my position: questioning one’s own work, and the mission that you have from the moment you are born and as long as you are around here, is essential. Well, essential if one considers oneself to be an intelligent man, and I can at least assure you that I have put all the means at my disposal to this end. “I have read all the best, I have painted more than ‘El Tostao’ and my entire generation combined, and I have tried to surround myself with the most cultured and intelligent people in this country,” he told journalist Antonio Arco in 2020.
During the pandemic, José Lucas composed two works for LA VERDAD that represent “a manifestation of pain told with good words: with color.” Locked in his house in Mazarrón, the artist recognized his fear. But, in addition to the man with fear, he always showed himself to be the most eloquent artist with a tangled, tremendous verb, a whirlwind that will always be among our memories.
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