Juan Alió’s work is a set of contemporary art highly conjoined, but with different styles or eclectic, full of color and imagination. He presents some minimalist abstract paintings, which he calls with the use of colorful schematized geometry, which is the tendency to reduce the world to the essential and the practical. His work reflects the ascetic personality of this painter who reduces his artistic-plastic needs to projects creative.
Abstract art is an autonomous and not common language, for this reason some persons believe that abstracts are profane works, not understandable, simply because they do not understand them or they continue to resist the recovery of the dream experience, that is, they cannot see another world but that of figurative images. But there are other invisible worlds that are here, with us, as we can see in Juan Alio´s work, where figures and objects change from their understandable forms to their possible forms, as can be the case of the painting “Silhouettes” (a woman in profile ) that reminds us of a Picassian form, which is nothing more than the intermediate step between figuration and the minimalist abstract.
Its diffuse spaces are geometry, very frequent in minimalist art, also called “primary structures” or “ABC art”, a primary and materialist art because it eliminates any illusion of visible figuration, something like the sculptural counterpart of “post-pictorial” abstraction. The most conspicuous representatives of minimalism are Donald Judd, Sol Le Witt, Robert Morris, Don Flavin … They used shapes very simple geometric patterns, executed with they vision of the industrial world that surrounded them. There are no underlying meanings or symbolisms, but fantasy project schemes.
To conclude, I think that Juan Alió in his most outstanding last work seeks a verse and a space of his own in painting, and without a doubt, the path he seeks is the correct one in contemporary art.
Ramón Fernández Palmeral. (Writer and plastic artist).
In his SERIES, Juan Alió walks through geometric or round labyrinths where he meets Picassian ladies who give him intertwined winks, and who play at hiding in the abstraction of their diffuse spaces looking at the skies that define the seasons through which we pass in the time.
And while he walks through his imaginative places, he leaves a trail of vibrant and pure color that sometimes screams with the force of Fauvism, filled with generous oil in the purest abstractions and lightly in the silhouettes.
Alió finds the pleasure of art, not so much on arrival but on the way. You will do well to keep going through imaginative experimentation. We, who are still watching while him go will also enjoy the milestones that his works leave along the way, because they are authentic works of art out of the hand and the “not fuzzy” mind of a nonconformist.
Juan Alió’s painting was an amalgam of experimentations, constructive in its academic beginnings, and it´snow immersed in geometric and round labyrinths in which colored silhouettes bordering on the fauve appear; diffuse spaces of abstract spots richly filled with gracious spatula; skies more or less hidden behind the realism of a barred window, through which the human being looks at a world imagined, using a kaleidoscope of almost infinite shapes and colors, from which lyrical and geometric abstractions arise rooted in the most historical origin of pure abstraction.
There is all this in Juan Alió’s painting, arising from a dual mind that oscillates between the poetic and imaginative and the mathematical rigor that make up his rich artistic and vital personality.
Carlos de Villaelena (art critic)
