Javier Pagola

Javier Pagola (San Sebastián, 1955) studied Architecture in Madrid from 1974 to 1978, and has taken part in various solo and collective exhibitions since 1977. His work can be found in various Spanish museums, and in the Menil Foundation in Houston, Texas.
Antonio Saura on Javier Pagola:
Lack of gravity, two-dimensionality, accumulation, the importance of the graphic element, freedom of handling, the presence of irony: these are, perhaps, some of the most obvious characteristics that define the complexity of Pagola's work, one of the most interesting artists in the current Spanish aesthetic. Other qualities could be added to this list, the most important of which is perhaps the confluence of contradictory signs, the practice of a finished unfinishedness, for example, and although it might seem paradoxical, an artistic conception that locates objectivity and subjectivity at the forefront. In this way, Pagola's work seems to refer, in the first aspect, both to the depiction of an artistic reality already dazzled by itself - the graphic style of comics, cartoons, advertising, caricature and wall graffiti, for example - as well as to its own objective reality, in this case in relation to personal experience and the theatre of the vanities we contemplate daily. The graphic and iconographic references from both worlds - in which the fascination for the subculture of our era never ceases to be present - are left dazzled, in the realm of real subjectivity, by the need for distortion, fusion and duplicity, the implacable ordering of the accumulated artistic mechanism, the use of a forceful freedom and the presence of irony and playful commentary.
From the text Glosa para Javier Pagola, by Antonio Saura.