Juana Francés (Alicante, 1924 – Madrid, 1990) is one of the most distinguished names in Spanish art of the second half of the 20th century, founder of the El Paso group and creator of a powerful style of painting that makes her unmistakable. Her training took place at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando (Madrid) and extended with several stays in Paris and other European cities, where she came into contact with the great masters of art and the latest movements. In 1950, she entered the art scene, practicing a hieratic figuration that led her to be present at major national and international events, such as the Hispano-American Biennial and the Venice Biennale (1954). Beginning in 1956, she delved into informalist, gestural, and material abstraction, achieving critical acclaim and participating, along with others such as Pablo Serrano and Manuel Millares, in the founding exhibition of El Paso, held at the Buchholz Gallery in February 1957. Juana Francés continued her abstraction journey until 1963, when she reinterpreted her initial hieratic figuration with the series "Man and the City," to which she devoted most of her career. In 1980, she decided to return to abstraction with "Underwater Backgrounds," which would lead to her final series, Comets, in 1985.
Through the coherence and personality of her work, Juana Francés established herself on the national and international art scene, exhibiting at venues such as the Guggenheim in New York (1960) and the Tate Gallery in London (1962), and participating in emblematic events such as the São Paulo Biennial (1971), among others.
Throughout her career, Juana Francés has created based on her need to express herself, rather than establishing a progression or evolution. Juana Francés emphasizes the conceptual nature of her work; her work reflects her concerns and reflections beyond the chronological moment of its creation. Her works respond to the major themes that concern the artist and affect the human condition—themes that remain relevant today. More relevant than ever, Juana Francés is an artist with her own voice.
The block sheet dedicated to Juana Francés is a composition composed of a photograph of her studio, a photograph of herself and herself in her studio, and her work, Los mandados (Mandatory), is a mixed-media work on canvas from 1976 and measures 117 cm high, 150 cm wide, and 15 cm deep.
The work belongs to the series "Man and the City," a series begun in 1963, in which she reflects on the solitary life of the metropolis and for which she creates a story featuring a character and a setting that will dominate all the works in this series. The "anthropes," as she calls these characters, are beings composed of clocks, cables, and debris from urban and technological life, linking to the principles of French Nouveau Realisme and its defense of the "poetic recycling of urban, industrial, and advertising reality." Human beings have been reduced to the condition of machines (even their legs are now wheels for faster travel) and inhabit compartmentalized, isolated, and dark spaces, a reflection of loneliness and lack of communication, the evils that Juana Francés denounces in an urban society governed by technology and fast-paced life.
While it's true that Francés sought to symbolize the society of that time in her series "Man and the City," where everything was filed, numbered, and classified, the artist was also deeply impressed by loneliness, the terrible solitude that a person can feel in a big city. Her works reflect the two constants that affect the human condition: on the inside, solitude, emptiness, nothingness; while on the outside, there is the multifaceted aggression in the relationship between the individual and society.
