Gestodedios

Artistic autobiography


gestodedios In Salamanca, beside to a sculpture of the sculptor from Salamanca, Venancio Blanco. 2018.

gestodedios In Cádiz, beside to a sculpture of the sculptor from Cádiz, Juan Luis Vassallo Parodi. 2016

Delante de Personajes a la salida de un concierto de rock, de Guillermo Pérez Villalta.
In front of "Characters at the start of a rock concert", by Guillermo Pérez Villalta. August 2018

Autorretrato con camisa a rayas Unfinished self-portrait from the late 1990s, probably 1997.

Autorretrato a lo Schiele Self-portrait from 2005.

Antes que nada 2006 self-portrait inside the watercolor "I was a simple artist first of all."

Concerns

I am a figurative painter. I am interested in the figure, mainly the female that I paint usually nude, landscapes and architecture.

I am a painter of invented scenes, I like that my artworks have something to tell, a story or describe a moment. I am interested in the history of art and I am aware of it when I work. I also like to transfer scenes and religious symbols to my work ("The Promised Land", the series "Angels", "The Annunciation", etc., but with the difference that my protagonists are really normal people

In general, although I like classic painting more than modern painting. Initially I was greatly influenced by the painters and movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but I am increasingly interested in the Renaissance and Baroque.

My current concerns revolve around the integration of the figure in the landscape or in scenarios.

Although I usually paint with almost all the media, my preferences are watercolor and oil.

I like history in general and art history in particular. I also like reading biographies. In my spare time, wich is little, I enjoy visiting bookshops and museums. My favourite museum it's undoubedly the Prado's Museum, perhaps because it is the one I have visited the most, without undermining others that I don't mention here or many galleries that I am like to have in my city. Anoher one of my hobbies is the book and art collecting. Specially I like collecting Spanish art from the XIXth and XXth centuries.

If you want to know a little bit more about my dayly work, you can read my i "Diary of an artist who fights for being an artist". You can also download my mi portfolio and see my works: Portfolio-gestodedios.pdf

Short biography

I was born in Salamanca in the autumn of 1971 and very soon I moved with my parents to Cadiz where I had the privilege of being able to watch day after day the sunsets of the Atlantic, my sea. These are the two cities that accompanied me in my childhood and those that I think most influenced my painting.

I've been drawing, painting and scribbling since I can remember. Back in 1989 I moved to Seville to study architecture, like many others, influenced by the fact that the drawing had to be a help there, but turned out that it became mostly a refuge. In Seville it was my awakening. There I became acquainted with poetry and I was part of a group of young people who, under the name of Azúltimo, were shooting for a few years in the capital of Seville, until after finishing our respective studies, it slowly collapsed.

Thanks to the architecture I learned of Austrian Secessionism, and following an exhibition that took place at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, I met the drawings of Gustav Klimt, a painter whom I consider my first great influence. Since then, pushed by the dismay, back in the year 95 I began to dedicate myself more seriously to the office of painter, though never as much as I wished. It was also in those years when I adopted the signature joining my two last names: Gesto and de Dios, Gestodedios.

Klimt brought Egon Schiele, symbolism, Munch, klee, pre-Raphaelites, painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Also, of course, the Spanish painting of this period: Romero de Torres, the blue and pink Picasso era. And as in this life one thing nevitably leads to another, as if everything was chained, appeared Dalí, and also Giotto, and Escher, and Gaugin, and a long etcetera, each contributing its bit of sand in this stage so eclectic.

Among the contemporary Spanish painters I am especially attracted by the work of my countryman Gillermo Pérez Villalta, a painter whom I also knew in my student life from his exhibitions in Seville and Cadiz, with whom I find some coincidences and whose painting I admire. Villalta has taken me to the New Madrid figuration and in general to the study of the debate Madrilenian Movida. My painting is essentially figurative. In addition, in the last period of my painting I have been greatly influenced by the work of the Flemish painter Patinir who has taken me to change the sea for the landscape as the background of my last works.