Exhibition held at the Juana Mordó Gallery. Madrid.

First the magic unreality of the spirit that demineralised matter dominated. One was in a dark environment, a climate that was possible for any kind of dream; for any drama or dreamlike senselessness. The blue-black of the inexcrutable distance denied us clairvoyance. It plunged us alone with the rock and a hint of life from nowhere. By the eyes and the touch linked to them, it held us to its unexpected consistency.

Then it became light. A certain penumbra. A dark light from which we deduce that the mysteries of Gran are mysteries of the here and now. From the ground we walk on. Of the skies that are furrowed. Of the sea. Of the winds. From the meadows, sickles, peaks, plains, prairies and wastelands. In shady as an intricate forest where the sun longs in vain to penetrate.

Afterwards, reality has given way. Not so that it becomes the goal of decent pictorial work. Not just to show it in a not very suspicious face. But to make it an emotional enclosure for the enigma that overwhelms the spirit of the person who is painting. By Enrique Gran.

Gran has never looked away from his surroundings. It’s easy to notice his shocks, his interest and penetration in the face of everything that moves around him. It is necessary to know him: even out of the corner of his eye, he looks as if he were touching; he reacts with very fast reflexes of an animal alienated from its territory. He sees with intensity.

But he feels even more powerfully. There is a strange psychic place inside him. I would not want him to die with it without having reached us.

With the voice of a very substantial painter, Enrique Gran introduces us to where the real is unquestionable, in a black and blue landscape that we have all seen or thought we saw at some time in our lives as absent-minded seers. In it he alienates us to impregnate us with the mystical fullness of his psyche. Gran is realistic and intrasychical.

Yet, let us not fear. He does not pretend to be tremendous. He is authentic. All possible shudder disappears through the gift of pictorial beauty, catharsis of all unfeigned ferocity. Transcendent. Creative.

Joaquín de la Puente