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Forty years following his first exhibition, the Aragonese painter Pepe Cerdá brings his most recent work to Madrid, a large exhibition with his figurative-style landscapes and portraits. He does it in the Casa de Vacas, in the Retiro Park, a room that has become a reference for contemporary realistic painting. Before Cerdá, figurative painters such as Alberto Martín Giraldo, Charles Villeneuve or Irene Cuadrado have passed through the room.
Cerdá has more than two hundred exhibitions, individual and collective, in his forty years of career. From 1988 to 1990 he lived in Madrid on a scholarship at the Casa de Velázquez, where he established a close relationship with the new figurative artists. He has a special relationship with Madrid, and it is not the first time that he has exhibited alone: in 2002 he did it at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, and since then he has done it often in exhibitions in various galleries.
The pandemic has been a creative time for Pepe Cerdá. In February 2021 he opened ‘Similarities’, his solo exhibition at the Goya Ibercaja Museum in Zaragoza. «During the pandemic, when we were all locked up, I followed an idea that was born in London: I offered to take a free photo of the first health worker who sent me a photograph of himself. Within five minutes I had one, and I don’t know why, but I ended up painting fourteen. Then I continued with the trades, and this is how I painted the portraits in this exhibition: how children play, without knowing why they do it. And then there are the landscapes. I paint what is close to me, the landscapes of Villamayor, where I live, or my house in France”, explains Cerdá. The year is going to be intense for the Aragonese painter, who will move to Paris when he closes this exhibition in Madrid, where he has an exhibition scheduled for the end of March.
«Borges said that he wrote books so as not to spend his life correcting manuscripts. That is the reason why he is exposed: so as not to do the same painting a thousand times », argues the Aragonese painter.
