The exhibition entitled ‘The Rivals Of The Sea’ consists of three works of large format 2x153cm and three medium pieces of 76x56cm. The technique used is oil charcoal and oil pastel on Saunders Waterford’s paper.

For Puche it is important that “the drawing is to be shown as an event and a setting where the passions are unleashed and an emotional, reflective and analytical.
The Spanish poet, Fray Luis de León, said that “words are missing to describe the feelings of the soul”. That amalgam of soul states such as passion, violence, tragedy or restlessness are shown as rivals of the sea. The sea itself is a great event.

Following the path of his latest exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center of Málaga, ‘The snow is dancing’, the artist continues to rely on music as a common thread since the pieces have been blow by blow and drop by drop.

The titles chosen for the pieces are cities with special relevance in classical music. One of the pieces ‘Shubertiade’ shows a gigantic wave that seems to gobble up a surfer, but what happens is that she is enjoying this fall between the sublime of the flight, and the violence of the fall itself. Therefore there is the complicity of the person with nature.

José Luis Puche (Málaga,Spain 1976) has a PhD in art history. His career as an artist took off in 2005 when he held his first solo show in his home city. By 2008, just three years later, he was able to break into the international scene. Drawing is the pivot around which his work revolves, and he evidences a truly astonishing technical skill in this respect, considering that he is self-taught but perhaps also because of his uninhibited approach. As a draughtsman, his learning is the slow result of a fierce determination from early childhood, and both his technical knowledge and stylistic evolution owe everything to the selective voracity of his gaze and the insistent exercise of the trained hand.

In his mimetic drawings he uses the colours demanded by the drawing itself, sometimes just black and white, sometimes very colourful tones that catch the spectator’s eye.

The alleged emotional indifference of the colour grey is offset in his work by a very physical touch of the pencil that turns the drawing into a passionate corporal dance. Equally patent is the artist’s natural tendency to experiment with materials up to the point, for example, of using oil charcoal to achieve a watercolour effect.

His inclination to represent reality as fiction is plainly obvious. The exploration of reality that Puche practises ultimately elevates the value of the apparent to the status of real. His works distinctly evoke uncertainty, generating a sense of disquiet.
During his career, Puche has exhibited at prestigious venues like Centre Pompidou, CAC Málaga, the Sydney Opera House, where he was the only European artist invited to take part in the group show 9 Hours Underground, and at fairs like the YIA Art Fair (Paris) and Basel Scope Art Show in New York and Switzerland. In this year Puche had exhibited in Madrid (Spain) a solo show in Madrid Xavier Fiol gallery and in Palma de Mallorca. He has also won several prizes and distinctions, including the International Emerging Artists Award in 2016(Dubai).