Julio Anaya Cabanding - Guernica

It is not surprising that Julio Anaya Cabanding makes Picasso an interlocutor with whom he dialogues and pays homage in his work. There are several reasons that nourish this attitude. Beyond the shared origin of both, evoked by Picasso through the Mediterranean and classical antiquity – also in writing with continuous references to his hometown – and by Julio Anaya Cabanding precisely through the reference to the genius from Malaga and the pictorial school developed in Malaga in the 19th century, the young artist finds in the master a painter of painters, exactly what he is: both are artists who visit, appropriate and reformulate the history of art and many other cultural registers.

 

This Guernica was created by Julio Anaya Cabanding in 2023 for Wunderkammer, his soloshow at Nanzsuka Underground (Tokyo, Japan). In this cabinet of wonders, in the manner of André Malraux’s imaginary, the popular and the museum, the history of art and its expanded formulation as visual culture coexisted in an exercise of de-hierarchization and re-dimensioning, a modus operandi that we cannot understand as separate from Picasso-like approach.  Among the numerous registers that accumulated in that exhibition from masterpieces to film images, popular imagery, or consumer goods turned into generational symbols, this Guernica appeared as monumental and unquestionable icon.

 

Guernica as a symbol in its entiret, but also as a sort of tether that binds Julio Anaya Cabanding to his origin, evidencing his emotional cartography.
This Guernica responds to the poetics that have distinguished Julio Anaya Cabanding on the international art scene: 18 found cardboard pieces – let us not forget that Picasso introduced declassified materials and the objet trouvé – that have been assembled, as ephemeral and discarded material, they become not only the support for the eternal art piece but also turn the image into an object. Precisely there, in these points of friction, lie some of the great contributions of the young artist from Malaga. The dialogue between Dream and Lie of Franco, the seminal print for Guernica, where the future and magnificent work begins to germinate, cannot be overlooked either: those motifs on paper return to paper, just as Guernica, painted by Julio Anaya Cabanding, now returns to Malaga with all the poetic significance this journey can have.