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Tún



Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City, Guatemala

JOSÉ FRANSISCO TÚN
By Edith Recourat

In Guatemala, a country of five thirteen million inhabitants, 60% of the population is under twenty years of age. Old land and young country, it is from his youth that the new values ​​sprout every day. And if youth, today, is synonymous with rebellion against sclerosed and outdated structures, it also happens that it brings us a fresh, uncontaminated image of the world that surrounds it.
José Francisco Tún was born and was born in the city of Guatemala in 1948 and has chosen as a child he chose the sunny slopes of the Cerrito del Carmen as a field of observation and recreation. There, between heaven and earth, has been formed formed a vision, infinitely personal and original of the land and its inhabitants. Vision that imprinted his work the seal of space freedom while reducing beings and city to an organic whole endowed with window-eyes, arteries-roads, towers-lighthouses, and walls of smooth epidermis.
Its family landscape has been a sea of ​​domes and roofs whose silhouettes are diurnal and nocturnal, cut against the intense blue of the parish sky or in the nocturnal haze of the far away. From the streets of stone or asphalt that surround the Cerrito before moving away in tangential angles, echoes of laughter and quarrels reached him. The dream on the one hand, the street scenes on the other, came to constitute thus the two permanent poles of this work that restores its meaning to the most trite words: authenticity, genuine, etc. Clean and subtle, refined and honest, it is born from an interior vision projected towards formal and expressive elements, apparently independent of each other but that are completed without opposing each other. Nothing is invented and everything is new. From his aerial viewpoint, Tún seems to be the first to discover the imaginary and real world. He seems to be the first to discover the soul of things. He seems to be the first to lend the magic of color to the sad city.
In an era so saturated with hatred and resentment, Tún’s work seems to us outside of time and contingencies. Not out of indifference but because of a lack of antagonism and calculation.

“Primitivo”, in the best sense of the word, recreates a direct poetic current with surrounding elements, erasing without effort how much opacity, how much cliché, how much pseudo-intellectual and material vulgarity would have made him lose his identity and his essential relationship with man.

Before an urban country poetized by the distance and the changes of light in the morning and in the evening, José Francisco Tún has created a style and color genuinely his own. Figurative art, even in the pure triangles of “La Esquina” or in the trompe l’oeil frame of “La Ventana”, accepts no more measure than that of the impact provoked in his imagination by the function or form of the observed. So from the blue and yellow landscapes of “La Aldea”, from “La Entrada”, from “6 o’clock in the afternoon”: they owe little to reality and approach a surrealism without anguish that owes nothing to the past or to fashion .
In vain would be sought pretension, influence or morbidity to this painting, the result of an intimate harmony between the theme and the most extreme sensitivity.
However, despite its conceptual clarity and the originality of its composition, it is because of the refinement and subtlety of its color that it distinguishes itself more. There is no limit to the chromatic combinations obtained by Tún, both through mixtures of dyes and in their application. From grays to yellows, through the whole range of acrid tones, cocoa, coffee, mustard, lilac, halftones, quarters of tones, varied to infinity, punctuated by the bright red of the ceilings, bathed in intense blue; This admirably nuanced painting evokes, suggests and creates its own climate. Consecrates the young artist as a born colorist.

I am not trying to say that this first show by José Francisco Tún is exempt from defects. But, yes, he possesses in the highest degree those essential and irreplaceable qualities of a future great painter, qualities without which no learning, no academic training or exhaustive readings mean anything.
I take this opportunity to dedicate a few words of gratitude to John Gody, a businessman and a great amateur of beauty and painting. Since the initial impulse given in 1964 by the DS Gallery, a group of national and foreign collectors enthusiastic about the Guatemalan plastic expression has been formed. Among them, John Gody has distinguished himself due to his constant interest and encouragement for and with artists.On this occasion, I would like to thank Edith Recourat very much for the moral and material support she has given us and without which today’s exhibition would not have been possible.

The Impartial.Proyectos Ultravioleta Guatemala, October 13, 1970, January 19, 2012.

Other exhibitions by these artists at Proyectos Ultravioleta: