Telluric Composition / Mineral And Aquatic Landscape / Juan Luis Goenaga / Oil On Canvas

This oil on canvas by Juan Luis Goenaga (1950-2024), signed lower right and dated 86 (1986), measuring 46 × 55 cm unframed (60 × 70 cm framed), is fully in keeping with the artist's approach, characterized by a lyrical abstraction deeply rooted in the landscape. The work evokes a powerful and primal nature, where a vast aquatic area with green and bluish tones contrasts with a darker, mineral, and telluric lower section. The composition relies on a play of masses and tensions without explicit figurative reference, allowing the material and gesture to structure the space. The thick impasto, applied with brush and palette knife, gives the surface an almost sculptural density, while the palette of deep greens, muted blues, and earthy browns directly evokes the natural world so dear to Goenaga. Created in 1986, this work corresponds to a period of full artistic maturity, during which the artist asserted a personal pictorial language, based on the energy of gesture and the memory of the landscape, in a painting that is both meditative and intensely expressive.

Juan Luis Goenaga (1950-2024) was born in San Sebastián, in the Spanish Basque Country. A largely self-taught painter, he trained early on through drawing and painting, and then, in the late 1960s, made several trips to Europe, notably to Madrid, Paris, and Rome, where he discovered the major movements of contemporary art. From 1969 onward, settled in Alkiza, in a rural setting, he developed a personal language deeply connected to nature, the land, and the Basque landscape. His work evolved from a strongly organic abstraction in the 1970s to a more expressive and gestural style in the 1980s, sometimes incorporating figurative elements, while maintaining a central focus on matter and the energy of gesture. Goenaga exhibited extensively throughout his career, with over two hundred solo and group exhibitions in Spain and abroad, and benefited from numerous major institutional exhibitions, notably at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao and San Sebastián. Winner of several important awards, including the Gure Artea Prize in 1987, he is now considered one of the leading painters of the contemporary Basque scene, leaving behind a dense, committed body of work deeply rooted in the memory of the landscape.