José María Cano (born February 21, 1959) is a Spanish composer, once a member of the Spanish pop group Mecano, and more recently a conceptual artist.
Contents |
Cano was born in Madrid gave his first concerts as a university student in Madrid. There, he met Ana Torroja, who became the lead singer for the pop group Mecano. Their first album, also baptised Mecano (1981) and produced with financial backing of his father, included the hit "Hoy no me puedo levantar". Both José and his brother Nacho composed songs for all their albums
In 1984, José began to play piano and changed his method of composition. He began to compose for other singers, such as Ana Belén, Amaya Uranga, Sara Montiel, Julio Iglesias, Miguel Bosé, Alaska, Françoise Hardy, Sara Brightman, Simone, Mario Frangoulis etc. He composed some of the most important songs in Spanish language such as Hijo de la luna, Lia, Mujer contra mujer, Me cuesta tanto olvidarte, Aire, Tiempo de vals, Cruz de navajas, Naturaleza muerta, Una rosa es una rosa and several others that have versions in other languages by various well known singers.
After Mecano broke up in 1992, he composed an opera, Luna,[1] which was recorded with Plácido Domingo in the leading role. This was not a commercial success.
In 2007 José participated, with his brother and Ana Torroja, in a festival held in Madrid during an anti-drug campaign, in what one of José's paintings, the named Take a walk on the wild side, was auctioned.[2] The artwork depicts the actress Sonia Martínez who died 1994 as a result of her heroin addiction.
José María Cano began drawing at a very young age. From the age of 10, he attended the Rafael Hidalgo de Caviedes academy, followed by the Artaquio academy, in order to learn how to draw and paint in preparation for an architectural career. During his first-year architecture studies he learned to master encaustic with his shape analysis professor, who was a painter. He began to work professionally in 2002, although his first exhibition came in 2004 in Craig Robins’ Private Space, commissioned by Ambra Medda. Mexican gallery owner Ramis Barquet saw this exhibition and commissioned his first commercial exhibition.
That exhibit, entitled, "This Is Just Business", appropriated its imagery from the letters of his divorce and mixed with drawings of his son. He painted the most aggressive letters from his wife's lawyers on backgrounds, which resemble desert or icy landscapes, that, when combined with drawings of his son, attempted to re-contextualize the lawyer's letters, the purpose of which were to damage Cano's reputation in the midst of a contentious divorce. This work, painted meticulously by him and hung on the wall took, attempted to undermine the power of those letters. In other words, a letter on his desk which might make you think he was a despicable person, when painted and hung on his dining room wall might made you consider whether the person who wrote it who was despicable, rather Cano himself. Because his divorce took place at the same time as the Iraq war while he painted the letters of his divorce he also painted pictures about the war. He saw a rhythmic parallelism between the two events which coincided in time, namely a confrontation with economic undertones against a so-called enemy and where innocent people suffered the consequences, especially children. His paintings with drawings of his son are also from this era. Monochromatic drawings on a sheet of paper. Simple but conceptually very interesting.
Around this same time Cano started on a series of work where he projected drawings done by his son Daniel, who has Asperger's syndrome. Cano copied them meticulously on a large scale, viewing these works as an exercise in humility, where the father understood that he had to copy the son as opposed to the son copying the father. Later he began to paint newspaper headlines and articles, continuing to explore his perspective that the truth is only true until someone tells it. He has pictures, for example, with titles such as "Immigration Brings More Crime", where the expression of what is most likely a verifiable fact hides a xenophobic attitude of some of the heads of the English press.
His first exhibition on the world of finance, "The Wall Street 100"', took place in early 2006. Based on newspaper clippings taken directly from the Wall Street Journal, Cano painstakingly reproduced the small hedcuts portraits and surrounding column text in each clipping in large scale using colored waxes (encaustic painting). Reproducing these generic looking mass-produced portraits in wax was Cano's attempt to create authentic monuments with a three-dimensional effect and ironically express his opinion that these people were the new Venus-Aphrodites, and therefore he as a painter was obliged to affirm this beauty. As Hugo Rifkind wrote in an article in The Times newspaper art pages, "Cano's pictures surface has a translucent depth so that they are more like sculptures than paintings".
At the same time as painting characters from the financial world, he also painted statistics of the performance of the financial markets and the stocks of specific companies. He called this series of statistics "Mountains", considering them to be the new landscapes a painter should paint. Painting characters from the financial world and statistics instead of Venus-Aphrodites and landscapes allowed him to reconcile himself with traditional painting, which he does not renounce in spite of the conceptual nature of his work. In fact his series of bullfight etchings called "La Tauromaquia" had been shown at the Fine Art Museum of Hanoi and at the Picasso foundation in Málaga with the Goya and Picasso series of the same name, in the show "La Tauromaquia".
In spite of his technical preparation, Cano's work up to the present day has basically been conceptual. He works academically with a variety of labor-intensive art technics such as encaustic on canvas for his paintings, watercolor on paper for his drawings, or aquatint on copper plate for his etchings. Writing about him in the Architectural Digest, Cristina Gimenez says: "At a time when almost no artists draw, he converts this discipline into the central tenet of his work: black lines on a white background: With ink on paper or encaustic on canvas (an ancient technique using wax as a pigment binder) his production is impeccable and the effects are spectacular." Based on images which are originally newspaper cut-outs or photographs, he uses the contemporary techniques of appropriation as an aim to navigate the space between reality and truth. His favourite saying is by the painter Torres García, who said, "Reality has three dimensions, whilst truth has only two." The majority of his works are in black and white, and he extends Torres García's phrase in the sense that reality is multicoloured, whilst we tend to represent the truth in black and white. For him it is a scale of greys. He does not see black and white as a bi-chromatic reality, but as intervention and non-intervention. He converts the white background of his works on wax into an ether, a void on which he intervenes or does not intervene, in such a way that the three-dimensional or multicoloured reality becomes his work, not just in the two-dimensional reality, but in a one-dimensional reality consisting of intervention or non-intervention. As said by art critic Anthony Haden-Guest in his Financial Times column, Cano recreates the images meticulously applying seven layers of wax, in a process that may take up to a thousand hours per work.
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011