Giving life to suicidal flowers in the city

Jorge Galindo was just a teenager when he and his friend Santiago Sierra would walk the streets "totally fearlessly" and graffiti surfaces. Galindo and Sierra went on to form the group of artists called Comando Madrid.

"The materials I worked with came from the streets," said the Madrid artist during his visit to CAC Málaga (the city's contemporary art centre), where he has just opened his new exhibition called Wild Flowers (Las Flores Salvajes).

The life in those streets is present in the works he has created over the last five years, and which are now on the walls of this cultural centre in Malaga until 3 September. In this exhibition, Jorge Galindo brings suicidal flowers to life in 24 large-format works using his own visual language of collage and photomontage.

He calls them suicidal flowers because of where he sourced the materials that he uses for his works. He explained further at the launch of his exhibition at the CAC by outlining the meaning of Masquerade (oil on canvas and paper), a 2009 work in which the artist creates a 3D effect with posters collected from the street.

"I paint the flowers onto old posters because they have a texture that reminds me of the form of flowers. I always had to go looking for them on the outskirts of Madrid under motorway bridges because it was the only way I could find these posters preserved from the weather and the passing of time. They reminded me of flowers that grow on the train tracks; like suicidal flowers that grow along the motorways."

Galindo became emotional when talking about this latest series of his works completed with gallery owner Soledad Lorenzo, to whom he dedicates this CAC exhibition of paintings "that come directly from the studio and have never been exhibited due to size issues".

When observed carefully and closely, these works, which at first seem to have only the floral motif as the common element, go much further than that. They contain wallpaper, pieces lifted from the studio floor or strips of floral patterns surround the edges of the paintings to give the impression of a frame. The flowers, painted with thick brushstrokes by Galindo as he plays with "the plasticity of the paint colour that evokes a certain sensuality, a theme of carnality and sexuality".

Digital printing is something that he has added to his art in works such as Floralia XI and Floralia XII (both from 2021). "I'd worked on the flowers using photomontage techniques and old images, but I realised that I was painting the flowers in a very naive way. So what I did next was to take some of those turn-of-the-century postcards and make them the background for the paintings," Galindo explained.

Standing beside him, the curator of the exhibition, Fernando Francés, delves into the vocabulary of postmodernism to define the tension in these works by the Madrid artist, "half intellectual and half visceral".

"For me, Jorge Galindo is one of the three or four most relevant painters on the national art scene due to his link to postmodernism, which is what interests me the most. It is not the first time that flowers appear as the main theme in the history of art, but it is unique how he uses strips of paper, even the studio floor as additions to the painting, still using subtle, classic concepts but with a postmodern point of view," stated Fernando Francés in his speech at the launch of these large format works.

As the artist himself said, his hallmark in painting is "a hotchpotch of content and techniques" which, in some cases, could be "more abstract and more expressionist". All with unreal colours, countless layers and with the maximum number of recycled materials that he likes to call "reactivated". Surprisingly he admitted that flowers are not so important in his work: "What I really like is to paint," he stated.

In Wild Flowers he paints, yes, but he also brings to life that dark, suicidal side of nature that hides away in order to survive in the city.