When the knowledge of a trade, experience and skill in handling its elements come together, a complete artist like José Coronel emerges. This Venezuelan artist has a long career in various fields of art such as painting, sculpture, printmaking, muralism, graphic design, stained glass and public statuary. He is also a publicist, cultural advisor and teacher, all cultivated in almost forty years of intense work. His youthful restlessness and his insistent curiosity led him to study Pure Art at the Arturo Michelena School of Plastic Arts in Valencia, very close to his hometown and he immediately began his artistic experimentation creating works from the new figuration of the eighties . From the nineties he discovers his true path, and decides to break with figuration because he felt much more freedom in the material, the stain, the stroke and the color, as an expression of totality. It is dedicated to the experimentation with the Pure Color and the emotiveness of the Gestural He begins to create a work in which Color as a protagonist helps him to create compositions of free and unconscious expression with gestural strokes of great dynamism, with spots, dripping and thick lines that give a spatial rhythm to the composition on the canvas, leaving as consequence pieces with a marked accent of the Abstract Expressionism, particularly in the importance given to the process and the conceptual element. With the help of brushes, brushes, sponges, sprays and in recent years, digital compositions, Coronel combines layers and layers of pigments in a variety of colors in order to study color and light in its multiple edges. This artist likes to break down in a variety of styles the expressions of bright colors, their contrasts, their composition, see how in one stroke merges with the other and how transparency is discovered in each represented element. For Coronel the most important aspects of his work are Color, Transparency and Music, this last element has been with him for a long time. For him, the symphonic music and particularly, the music of the rock band Pink Floyd are entities that accompany him in his creative process as a double connection with the unconscious creator. In the same way that kandisky, Coronel can not separate two absolute abstract conceptions, Kandisky, considered that colors and sounds were abstract conceptions that made the soul vibrate both the creator and the observer, elements that were capable of producing a visual impulse Immediate of the senses and the music produced a stimulus that died with silence. While Coronel starting from the internalization of these precepts composes through each emotive and sentimental trace, pieces with an important subjective load and open to diverse interpretations such as the coarse understanding of the human being. INFORMAL FORTUITO Y GESTUAL José Coronel is relatively young. He was born in 57. He is 54 years old and 34 of versatile and fertile career in the fields of sculpture, drawing, painting, printmaking, advertising, muralism, stained glass, as well as being a professor, cultural advisor, with extensive participation in instances directives of culture and the arts, specialized in reconstructing, remodeling and creating large-scale urban monuments. His pictorial work is versatile, of great formal and technical diversity, with a predominance of the spontaneous, fortuitous and gestural. He usually uses color spots of informal effects, but under the compositional control of the reason. Perán Erminy International Association of Art Critics (AICA), Chapter Venezuela, October, 2010. POETICS OF THE INVISIBLE Speaking recently with José Coronel, I noticed in him a strong and energetic will to create that keeps his attention absorbed, even more than ever, after the trip he made to Europe, between 2011 and 2012. The direct contact with the works of the great masters of universal art impressed him in such a way that in his current production the impact that experience caused on him is noticed. For example, the extraordinary engravings (Carceri d'Invenzione) of the 18th-century Italian architect and engraver, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, induced him to conceive some large-format paintings in which he dispensed with his particular polychrome, but retaining his abstract style of vital lyricism. In these works, inspired by Piranesi, black, white, gray and blue prevail. From his visual poetics, Coronel reinterprets the imaginary prisons of Piranesi characterized by dark passageways, steep stairs, spaces of incredible heights and strange galleries that lead nowhere. Oriented in its permanent search, in its tireless journey towards the dark and mysterious background of being (its psyche), and the essence of things (its soul), -like a "journey to the center of the earth" or to the "dark side" of the moon »-, we continue to see Coronel, with more impetus than before, determined to illuminate, through art, the unfathomable inner world; to bring to the surface, with a radiant transparency charged with light and color, the essence of the microcosm and the macrocosm, to unveil the hidden side of reality, to the point of dazzling us to hallucination. Coronel shows us what is beyond the mere appearance of things. Your creative process is like that, then, a way to enter into another purely spiritual, mystical and sacred reality. José Gregorio Noroño International Association of Art Critics (AICA), Chapter Venezuela, October, 2014. AN IGNEOUS TREATMENT FOR THE WORK OF JOSÉ CORONEL The work of José Coronel is a work that gives us energy, vitality. It is full of expansive emotions and multiple feelings that inhabit the human being, especially those that are more irrational, more free. It is a painting that can be understood without having a scholarly knowledge because it immediately impacts, it penetrates through the pores of the spectator to connect with its internal privileges, with all its emotional charge and without any barrier. But it is not an easy painting: his work renounces statism, it is dynamic, it is not quiet. Struggle to radiate a vital impulse of continuous renewal in a time that slides vertiginously, swiftly, and the author at that time wants to accompany us and rock with joy. His colors appear full and saturated saturation, present, accompanied by the gesture, are full, forceful, flees nuances or halftones. They are colors that are now, they are already. Establishes lineage with New York expressionist abstract painting, but surpasses it by unleashing the values it poses by taking them to the extreme. All his prints are present in the author, who gathers material and color to offer us a work of great communicative intensity, of immediate impact by the skilful management of pictorial, material and compositional resources. His paintings are like the igneous bird, Phoenix, which is reborn from its ashes. They always mark the resurgence of the human being and his ability to overcome and succeed through time. Fire that is life, which is a source of creation and reflection of the passions and wills of the tireless individual. They create a light but insistent, rebellious vital impulse. The work of Coronel gives us the impression of that intense visual poem that drives the development of humanity. Joan Esteban De Mercado, Dr. In Art Barcelona, Spain / José Coronel: contemporary lyrical expressionism Marisol Pradas S. José Coronel toured Europe participating in a series of group exhibitions, mainly in Italy, between 2011 and 2012, while visiting other important countries in the art world such as Spain and France. In the main museums, he observed the works of the great abstract, realistic, impressionist, expressionist and cubist masters enriching his already thirty-five year old trajectory "versatile and fruitful in the fields of sculpture, drawing, painting, engraving, advertising, muralism, stained glass, besides being a professor, cultural advisor, with wide participation in directive instances of the culture and the arts, specialized in reconstructing, remodeling and creating large-scale urban monuments "as the art critic correctly points out (also painter) Perán Erminy. His sensibility as an artist was touched when he met again with Picasso's Guernica and the monumental transcendence of Venetian architect and engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi, among the varied agenda he fulfilled. Therefore, his return could not be better influenced. He arrived with renewed energies, with lots of ideas and an immense desire to continue as a creator in the infinite plan of art. After much creating, of much research, of allowing himself more freedom, about fifteen years ago, he became passionate about the possibility of combining digital images with his direct intervention in canvas. "After having experimented in my process of doing things with the different techniques and disciplines in the plastic arts, drawing, painting, sculpture in its different materials and behaviors, I once again embark on a new language that today we could say universal how is the digitalization of the image, where the creator has a palette of millions of colors and different resources and tools to create their own language, "said José Coronel. Despite the everlasting reflection on the purity of art, history is showing that the best creators can do, in particular, is to work together with technology, transcending paradigms, and achieving the contemporaneity that it requires in the spacetime that they live . If he had already been harvesting a work of formal and technical multiplicity, influenced by the spontaneous, the inadvertent and gestural, in canvases loaded with jets of color and the projection of spaces of light, after his tour of the Old Continent, he abandoned shyness of the small or medium format, for with shrewd force, to achieve the visual enjoyment of the great pictures. Coronel feels it this way: "I build things that do not exist in the chaos of reason to make see what did not exist before in the real world, but in the creative spaces of my inner thinking cosmos; Evolving from the Genesis of figurative creation to a much more magical world by its shapes, light and color, achieving through virtual images with the technological resource of digitalization, opening the window of imagination that transcends beyond the image, time and space” Digital graphic printing is the pretext. The software provides a background of spot colors that have been previously chosen by Coronel on your computer. Then there is his display, his movements, his perceptions of what he feels in front of the printed canvas. It is spontaneity conscientiously. As Professor Xavier Berenguer concludes in his article Art and technology: a border that collapses: "The computer is therefore a prosthesis of the mind and, as such, it is available to the artist; in particular, of the artist for whom creativity and technique constitute two sides of the same coin “. Light and color in the digitized work intervened by an author create a new language, a new form of expression that must be completed by a spectator. What goes inert on the printed canvas, after work in front of the computer, becomes an abstract landscape, contemporary lyrical expressionism, in the eyes of those who observe and listen to the process of elaboration of these works, in the own workshop of Coronel, who when creating listens to music, especially to the group Pink Floyd and to the also musician, researcher and artist, Brian Eno. In large format, thinking of museums and billboards, the expression of his work has a freedom that helps connect with color without enigmas. The door is open to grandiosity because that is how life was conceived. The clarity of his intervention attracts in these dimensions a dream vision, treasured by the fate of color combinations. The Mayan world with its emerald and coral green, its vibrations orange, fuchsia, gravitational blue, emerge from the ancestors to tell us magnificent stories of those communication bridges that opened to the gods and were mutilated by time. Coronel also establishes a connection with digital, a commitment to establish a fair competition with the tool that provides technology, which feeds with soul and knowledge to achieve harmony and spectacularity. Not in vain it is said that the true work of an artist is born after twenty or thirty years of researching and producing. The phallus folds are still present, bathed by jets of loose glaze. They are spouts of power, drunk with behavioral nerves that correspond to their spiritual search. The silhouette of a breast also appears in her work to show us the beauty and the pueril need to redefine sexuality, to blur her towards the magic that her creativity brings, her tantric peace, beyond desire. In all the strokes this plastic artist locates that manifest connection with the cosmos, with the genius of an omnipotent energy, nothing silent, always mutant, by which to move his path in faith. And although we do not mention religion, the encounter with these works indicates that the exploration towards the different philosophies of life has been profound. It is enough to know that colors are born in illusion, in belief, and live in the digitized work of Coronel in open polychrome; in being. It is also a purification conquered by perseverance and in the same enjoyment that offers every artist to continue his work in the beauty achieved, which has been great here. The tribute made by Coronel to the master Piranesi (1720-1778) after knowing his work up close also allows him to wander around the fantastic and real buildings left by this artist, with the recreation of his stairs, his characters; the ruins, looting and burning of Rome, which left a personal and fearsome mark of the history of this Empire. In black and white, with vigorous strokes, with just the light of a blue and a magenta, takes us to this unprecedented tribute to a man who knew how to get ahead of his time. And this open window is the silent gaze towards death, the skeletal emptiness of destruction and the lack of humanity. Coronel has entered into the vigor of the plastic story. He has expanded his visual dialogue. He has purified and therefore refined his ideal as a creator and enriches his creative expression with poetry. Light for the psyche. JOSÉ CORONEL He was born in Maracay, Edo. Aragua, Venezuela (1957). He studied Graphic Design and Advertising (1980), Pure Art, School of Plastic Arts Arturo Michelena, Valencia, Venezuela (2000). He was professor of design at the Charles Word Design Institute, Valencia, Venezuela (1987,1988), worked as a Creative Designer at Veval Publicidad-VEPACO, Valencia (1987-1990) and as a professor of Drawing and Color Theory at the CUAM Institute , Valencia (1988-2000). His artistic career includes individual and collective exhibitions, participation in salons and biennials in a variety of countries such as Chile, Argentina, Italy, China, Peru, Venezuela and Portugal. He has exhibited in a variety of spaces among them, the Museum of Modern Art of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Francisco Narváez Museum, Edo. Nueva Esparta, Venezuela, Banco Industrial de Venezuela, Caracas, Galleria BLUorg, Italy; Magnolias Fine Arts-Gallery, Madrid, Spain; 25 The Anniversary of the Museum of the Americas, Houston, USA; Art Expo. Under Art Basel Miami Beach 2016, Florida, USA, among many others. / He made several samples between the years 2018-2019 exhibited in a variety of spaces Miami Art Design- Miami Circle.Art He has obtained several awards such as the First Prize Arturo Michelena School of Plastic Arts, Valencia (1987), First Prize, Carabobeños Artists Collective Exhibition, Valencia (1988), VII International Digital Art Exhibition (Cuba, 2005) among others. His works are part of collections in Venezuela, Spain, Italy, Austria and the United States. Currently lives and works in Valencia, Venezuela. Valencia-Venezuela + 58 (424) 440.9819 + 58 (241) 891.0806 e-mail: [email protected]