JULIO BLANCAS
GRAN CANARIA, 1967
Julio Blancas was born in 1967 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. He studied sculpture at the Plastic Arts Schools of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Santa Cruz de Tenerife. His work is made with pencil or graphite on paper, canvas or satellite dishes. He has participated in more than forty group exhibitions and seven solo exhibitions, in the main halls of the Archipelago, with incursions also in Madrid and internationally in centers located in countries such as Belgium and Italy; as well as a working stay with the artist Jiri Dokoupil in Berlin. He has exhibited in galleries in the Canary Islands, Berlin and Milan. His work is part of the collections of TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, CAAM. Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Gran Canaria Tenerife, Bruno Bischofberger Collection (Switzerland), Artizar Collection, La Laguna (Tenerife), Canary Islands Government, Sabadell Foundation, Santa Cruz de Tenerife Architects Association, etc.
Working almost exclusively with pencil and graphite, on various surfaces, Julio draws and draws from nature as a source of inspiration. His methodology is simple and obstinate: He opaques the surfaces through the repetition of the essential graphic gesture, the line. A stroke always made with graphite accurately reflects the gradations of light and gives rise to forms that emerge from the opacity, from the totality of black, thanks to an exquisite organization of the surface established so that the reflection and the brightness of the external light finishes the work.
Blancas works with the arguments of memory. It simulates natural spaces, but they are mental landscapes, ordered with a strongly structural sense of the result, which responds to an intention and a meaning.