Artists Reviews
Press Coverage
“José Luis Lázaro Ferré stands out among Catalans for the number and quality of his works”
October 01, 1971
EL IDEAL, GRANADA
“José Luis Lázaro Ferré exhibits two extraordinary drawings and some landscapes where the theme is only a pretext or support for the rhythmic play of the brushstrokes, with a predomination of reds and mauves which take on a radically musical tessitura”
September 5, 1972
EL ADELANTADO, SEGOVIA
“Lázaro Ferré paints with almost pure or totally pure colour, in loose, but well conjugated brushstrokes, without irritating fading-out, allowing them to vibrate with a subtle, almost breathable air.....
.....he has a certain propensity for ”fauve” chromatism which is compensated by the feeling of the light....”
July 28, 1975
MUNDO DIARIO
Francesc Gali
“.....A peaceful vision which discovers and reveals reality rather than repeating, inventing and counting, from a contained and quite explicit impressionism. Lázaro Ferré, is an artist for whom we predict a happy future, judging by a close look at his current work”
November 14, 1975
SUR
J. Mayorga
Lázaro Ferré, is a highly sensitive artist who shows his training, professionalism and creative ability with great simplicity. Unquestionably, a good exhibition”
February 04, 1976
NUEVA RIOJA
Roberto Iglesias
Lázaro Ferré works from a realism as crude as life itself and enhances it on the massive filling of colour, making it simple, pleasant, almost poetic, without needing to fall back on tradgedy. Sensitivity here has its greatest transcendency, because the light has no prescribed path or defined time. Lázaro Ferré is a born artist.”
March 29, 1977
EL NOTICIERO UNIVERSAL
Rafael Santos Torroella
“His vision of the 'Sagrada Familia' is an example of his mastery, sidestepping the architectural theme and turning the Gaudian facade into a purely pictorial question.”
March 30, 1977
SOLIDARIDAD NACIONAL
“With his vibrant pallet and fleeting vision, the painter constructs his landscapes, his still lives, his figure themes. But this passionate vehemence, almost a "fauve" resonance or a light expressionism, is contained by the ordering and balancing tendency which marks the constant effect of the work of Lázaro Ferré.”
April 02, 1977
EL CORREO CATALÁN
“Talent and sensitivity in the approach of the paintings, with excellent qualities and textures. Works which will be enjoyed.
March 25, 1987
DIARIO DE TARRAGONA
Vicente J. Amiguet
Reviews from his exhibition at the Kreisler Gallery in Madrid from February 17 to March 11, 2000.
EL PUNTO DE LAS ARTES
Editor: José Pérez-Guerra
Madrid, 25 February to 2 March 2000
Lázaro Ferré and the Joy of Living
by Julián H. Miranda
Just like Matisse in his famous painting The Joy of Living, where the great French painter evokes a mythical image of the world as he wished it to be in a kind of golden age, in the paintings of José Luis Lázaro Ferré (Barcelona, 1945) there is an idea of universal harmony, whether in the figures, still lifes with or without landscape, or in his somewhat surreal compositions, with that classicist arrangement through which he manages to strike a difficult balance between lyricism and avant-garde elements that take us back to Cezanne and especially Picasso. The Catalan painter studied at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Jorge and later expanded his knowledge of mural painting and engraving. His drawing ability stood out right from the start and he won a number of prestigious awards as a young artist, including the Barcelona City Hall Award and the 14th Sala Parés Youth Painting Prize. Most of his individual exhibits have been held in Catalan cities, though he has also exhibited in Malaga, Cuenca, Logroño and Madrid. The Madrid exhibit was held 24 years ago at the Bética gallery.
Lázaro Ferré now presents about 30 pieces at the Kreisler gallery, including oils and works on paper. He once again demonstrates his warm simplicity in works such as Terrace, by placing a flower pot and fruit on a table with a spacious background that shows us a poetic and unequivocally Mediterranean Sea; The Café, a small still life with fountain pen, spectacles, pipe, black telephone, bottle, glass and oil lamp, with a small frame that provides a hint of the human presence. He does it with that subtlety in the rhythm of greys, which becomes more ironic in Still Life with Fly Swatter. His attraction to the human figure comes out again in Lovers I and II, with a woman listening to a seashell and a man playing the cello with a musicality in the blue tones that endows their bodies with considerable plastic solidity, something that comes out again in Balancing Act, an oil painting on paper with a woman, who has a Cubist air about her, standing on a horse’s back. Thanks to the steady gradation of yellows, the hard profile of her face is somehow accentuated. Musical rhythms, nature and the human figure are present in many of these works, such as The Guitar, the Cat and the Bird; Chess, Violin and Fish; Fruit with Violin and In Tune, where he displays a masterly command of the use of pastels with a violin on a round table delimiting the space. The exhibition also includes his original landscapes of Seville and Sitges, the plasticity and elegance of his somewhat Magritte-style Hats, and the incredible detail of Table with Lemons, with its fluent brushstrokes that draw out the yellows against a greyish background to create a plastic language rife with stylistic coherence.
(Kreisler, Hermosilla 8, Madrid. Until 11 March 2000.)
EXPANSION
25 February 2000
Lázaro Ferré, at the Kreisler
José Luis Lázaro Ferré is an extraordinary landscape artist who uses his artistic sensitivity to explore simplicity and his own inexhaustible creative capacity. His widely varying palette shows that his talent is growing by the day, and he is also a perfectionist because every detail in his paintings is handled with the utmost care.
Moreover, his extensive experience allows him to escape unscathed when applying and mixing colors and when producing his now characteristic chiaroscuros.
All this should draw our attention to the fact that Lázaro Ferré is one of the best artists of the moment, and entirely capable of awakening the sensitivity of his admirers. This is an unbeatable opportunity to visit the gallery and acquire art that is not only beautiful, but a good deal for the money.
Lázaro Ferré has a profound sense of order, which leads him to give priority to the harmonious structure of the composition. And he does not take the tragic route or massively pile on color, two of the frequent errors of mediocre painters. The constant dialogue between perspective, balance and compositional harmony charges his paintings with more than solid experience.
And yet his brushstrokes are free and smooth, as if he let all his wisdom softly slip into the canvas.
Lázaro Ferré. Kreisler Gallery. Calle Hermosilla 8, Madrid.
February-March
El Periódico de Catalunya
Wednesday, May 21, 2003 Art
The clean avant-garde style of Lázaro Ferré
Maria Salvat Gallery Princesa Sofía Hotel Plaza de Pius XII, 4 Barcelona
José Luis Lázaro Ferré has an excellent feel for composition and skillfully uses sketching and color to create situations where objects float, leaving individual thought to establish hierarchies between the most varied objects. The hat represents intelligence, while the pipe and cigar embody the vitality of ideas that create styles and transmit the freshness of each moment.
Although historical avant-garde influences are present in Lázaro Ferré’s work, he is not a simple disciple, but someone who has been able to capture and blend the essence of each moment and make it his own. His stimulating paintings are characterized by their clean lines, while the apparent confusion belies an inner order. Well worth a visit.
JOSEP M. CADENA
Newspaper: La Clave
Print run: 60,000 copies
Publication date: 2-8 July 2004
The Imaginary World of Lázaro Ferré
Superimposed elements dominate his work
An exhibit of the work of Catalan painter José Luis Lázaro Ferré will be on display at the Galería i Leonarte in Valencia until 14 July 2004. Ferré’s works are full of diversified shapes and superimposed visual configurations that reappear in different paintings to create not only a universe that is at once imaginary and real, but also emotional ties that charge the work with poetic atmosphere. The more than twenty paintings on display include works in oil and pastel, such as “Barcelona 1”, “Barcelona 2”, “White Wine” and “Murano”.
NUEVA ALCARRIA
Wednesday, 3 August 2005
Bullfighting Mythology
By Rafael González
José Luis Lázaro Ferré, who has been selected to represent Spain at the 5th International Florence Biennale of Contemporary Art, exhibits his work in Brihuega.
Paintings and bulls are an inseparable couple in the art world. More and more artists are
choosing this evocative world as the subject matter of their work, though most incline towards more photographic realism. The proposal of José Luis Lázaro Ferré is surprisingly different. The renowned artist exhibits his most recent paintings at the Convent of San José in Brihuega, with bulls and mythological components taking centre stage.
José Luis Lázaro Ferré sees bullfighting as a wonderfully studied choreography. “It’s essentially a ballet, though a somewhat dangerous one”, said the experienced artist, whose works are now on display at the refurbished San José Convent in Brihuega. Though Lázaro Ferré’s Catalan heritage may suggest a certain rejection of the bullfighting universe, nothing could be further from the truth. “I like the energy and symbolism”, he said. He could not have found a better town in the province to exhibit his collection of bullfighting pieces than Brihuega, the bullfighting centre of Guadalajara, a place where bulls have acquired very special significance.
Vibrant images of bull’s heads and horns and highly schematic landscapes are the two most common kinds of paintings in the exhibition of Lázaro Ferré’s work, which will be on display in Brihuega until 10 August 2005. This group of twenty recently created works is not so much impacting as suggestive and calming, encouraging viewers to reflect on the subject matter. The exhibition opens with the painting El salto de la Garrotxa, a 57x113 cm vertical collage, which is a good place to start to understand what follows. Vista de Brihuega comes next, a new landscape collage with Modernist nuances. “I try to schematize landscapes to make them more contemporary”, explained Lázaro. The work provides a view of some of the most emblematic monuments in Brihuega, such as the Arco de Cozagón. The first mythological references appear a bit further along in the exhibition, where the bulls are accompanied by key mythological figures such as Zeus. In fact, there are four different paintings entitled Zeus. The figure of the bull appears in each one, along with certain common features. The bulls are more humanized than is customary and can be seen in movement, thus offering the sensation of being alive.
The rest of this excellent exhibition full of curious details is made up of paintings of bull’s heads and horns, and ephemeral, fleeting landscapes reduced to the bare bones. This is the case of the painting Egipto, a beautiful symbolic creation in which nothing is what it appears to be. The pyramids are newspaper cut-outs and the sand is from the desert, but not the Egyptian desert.
LAZAROFERRÉnews
Caixa Laietana Exhibit Hall
Plaza Santa Ana, 1-4 1rst floor, Mataró, Barcelona
From September 13th to November 4th, 2007.
Presentation
Lazaro Ferré is a painter that possesses a classic style and comes from a tradition fascinated with the great genres of all times such as still life, portrait, landscape and mythology. Faithful to his beginnings and Mediterranean, or rather Hispanic roots, Lazaro Ferré has been able to, despite this fact, create diverse expressions. This can only be a result of his radical independence, his continued reflection, a solid discipline and his proven capacity to assimilate diverse artistic traditions.
The exhibit that he now presents at Caixa Laietana in Mataró is a clear example of this accomplishment. Visitors will be able to enjoy an extensive part of this artist’s most recent work. Backed by a solid and fruitful professional trajectory, he has chosen for this occasion a collection of twenty pieces that reflect who he’s been from the beginning of his career. His constant exploration of shape and color has geared his research toward the diverse pictoric languages available today.
In Ferré’s work things are identifiable, reality is represented in a spontaneous and easy way, without sophisticated or theatrical resources. Drama is absorbed by time, and by an exhibiting immediateness that brings the spectator to the narrative fact. He reinterprets the great themes of classical tradition, which will always be of cultural interest to us. Thus, his is a work inhabited by fauns, gods, myths and legends that celebrate the barbaric beauty. Beautiful ugly forms, ugly yet fascinating at the same time like the owl heads that are both messengers of death and symbols of science and medicine.
Also, geometric shapes of a confident stroke with control over angels and straight lines, shapes that neatly cut and superpose each other constructing an atmosphere of unity; the result obtained is fruit of the author’s analytic and speculative capacity. Color is another cohesive element of this search, its use is determinative and its application, although sometimes violent, is always carefully worked. On occasion, the author allows himself to be carried away by an explosive outburst in the shape of an intense blot of color, be it red, ochre or black. This is used as a disjoining or delusory element of the unity obtained between color and shape. It becomes evident then, that the emotional outburst is one of the most relevant aspects in the work of Lazaro Ferré.
We are, without a doubt, before a demanding proposal in which we can track the diverse influences. Most importantly, we can identify the resounding and powerful volumes that define a style based on the creation of a universe of shapes and tonalities that is closed upon itself. Foreign to outside elements, this work stands out for its strength and balance without having to renounce to a realist treatment of figuration. Among other catalyzers of modernity, stand out the discovery of arts and cultures that did not hold the concept of fine arts as an autonomous dominium. The incorporation of African ritual masks and fetish figures where part of modern legend for an extended period of time and Lazaro Ferré has drastically recuperated the mark they left behind with his return to the caves, to the mask. In this manner, the painter has been able to find an attractive personal style that stems from a great technical rigor and from a profound knowledge of tradition.
Agueda Viñamata
Associate Art History Professor at
Elisava Escola Superior de Disseny,
Attached to Pompeu Fabra University