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Town Council names Jose Manuel Gomez Favorite Son of Fuente Obejuna, his place of birth, for his artistic labor. He is one of only two to have received this honor; the first was Don Miguel Castillejo Gorraiz, prelate of the Pope and President of Caja Sur. (DIARIO CORDOBA Tuesday, April 29, 2003, pg. 60)

The new roundabout of Santos Rein is named after the artist Jose Manuel Gomez. (SUR Sunday, November 5, 2000, pg. 12)

Painter Jose Manuel Gomez receives institutional recognition from the Town Council of Fuengirola for his artistic labor. (DIARIO Saturday, December 11, 1999, pg. 30)

Jose Manuel Gomez is given recognition by local government group. (SUR Saturday, December 11, 1999, pg.10)

La Casa de la Cultura presents the placard for the fair of La Virgen del Rosario. The placard presented is a reproduction from an oil painting by Jose Manuel Gomez. (SUR Sunday, September 3, 2000, pg. 12)

Jose Manuel Gomez illustrated with his paintings the books of the Spanish historian Juan Carlos Altamirano, "The Spanish Horse under the Bourbon Kings" and "The History of the Spanish Horse"

Oscar Arias, president of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace price recipient, and Guido Saenz, Costa Rica Minister of Education, inaugurated the art exhibit of Jose Manuel Gomez during the Commemoration of the 5th Century of the Spanish Conquest, which was celebrated in the National Museum of San Jose, Costa Rica in 1987. Jose Manuel Gomez was the artist representing Spain in this cultural exchange between Costa Rica and Spain.

Olivier Guishard, French Minister of Education, and Yves Rocher, French cosmetologist magnate, sponsored the art exhibit of Jose Manuel Gomez in the Galerie Ives Jaubert, Paris, France in 1970.

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INTERVIEW WITH JOSE MANUEL GOMEZ
(SUR Tuesday, November 9, 1999, pg. 14)

Although José Manuel Gómez, a painter settled down in Fuengirola for the last 25 years, has never considered his work to have arrived at the summit, four of his paintings already count on the recognition which it supposes that the Post Office have selected them to use their likeliness for stamps. With this edition in addition, Gómez will obtain one of his goals as a creator: to unearth to the Carthusian horse from its forgetfulness in the pictorial art.

How does it feel that your work is being published next to others, of masters such as Miró, Dalí, or Mingote?

As is logical, an enormous satisfaction and an evident pride. Apart from this, anyone in my place would feel the pleasure to know that what one does is recognised by an institution such as the Post Office.

You were born in Cordova but have been living in Fuengirola for 25 years. Do you feel being a part of it, of belonging here?

Well, I was born in Fuente Obejuna, but after all this time, this is now my town. I chose it to live in, in addition I have my best friends here, here my children were born and here are the people whom I love most. Throughout these years, I have built friendships that have always been close to me and which are already part of my life.

I believe that horses had something to do with your decision to live here. Is this true?

Yes, there is much truth in that. What convinced me, mainly, was the great impact that the horses caused in me. I discovered here a panorama that I did not suspect, an atmosphere and a liking and passion for the horse that I did not know. I thought there was only fun, laughter, and then later I have seen here more horses that in any other part of the world.

The Carthusian horse is the protagonist of these postage stamps. What is your interest in this animal?

Horses are my passion. They have not been a constant in my painting, but I am now in a stage in which they represent my maximum object of interest. I can safely say that I understand about horses and that facilitates my work. In fact, I think that it is not possible to paint horses well, nor animals in general, if they are not well known to the artist. As far as my interest for the Carthusian horses, I paint what I see as the legend of the Andalusian horse. The work of these monks with the horses seems to me magical and nobody has shown it in painting. It interests me to discover horses in a human context, removed from his natural surroundings, but where they are not in the way. Nowhere in the history of the Spanish painting can one find the horse as the main subject. The English have painted their horses, and the Arab races have also been more represented in French arabesque paintings, but in our Spanish painting there are only four equestrian works of Velasquez. I have the pride of being able to say openly that I have brought the horse forward from its forgetfulness, I have painted an unpublished subject.

Sometimes the painters are in dire straits because it is not a stable profession. When does one realise that, in spite of this, he is a painter?

To live from the painting is not always easy, there are good times and bad times, sometimes-true economic hardships. Perhaps it is possible to be said that the one that is a real painter has already passed through all these situations. But to say the moment in that one knows exactly that one already is a real painter is very difficult, it is not like being an architect. One is a painter when everything in ones life revolves around and becomes painting. To be painter is to think about brush strokes. It is really impossible to exactly define that moment, saying: now I am a painter.

Painting is your means of expression?

The painting is a language by itself. In the end, it is what you are and as you are, whatever version you use to make yourself known by the use of the brush.

And what is your inspiration?

Frankly, I have never gotten to know which moments or situations are to me the most propitious to paint. Sometimes I enter my studio thinking that it is going to be a wonderful day and in the end it is disastrous. Unfortunately, I have not found that source; which must be somewhere, if it exists. Perhaps we put this name to a series of elements that take the painter to their optimal moment, a psychological disposition. I have yet not seen any parallel between my capacity to paint and another specific situation.

But, to live in Fuengirola has marked your work in some sense?

Yes, perhaps not in the thematic sense; for example, I am not a man of sea, I am rather of earth. But it is true that I feel good living here. Through my window I see an impressive mountain landscape. They are small things that are there when I paint.

Tell me, who is your favourite master painter?

I cannot choose. I have had determined moments in my career during which I have been guided by or influenced by different painters. If I must name one, "San Diego Velasquez", is always on my mind. Like when everything that is spoken is well said, when everything is understood is what Velasquez painted, he painted everything so well that he was understood perfectly.

Which of your paintings would you like to keep for yourself?

From the moment at which my main satisfaction is that my work is welcomed, because without that it would not have sense, I do not see any sense in keeping my paintings for myself. In addition my paintings never seem to me to be quite rounded off or perfect. Each one is a step to arrive at the next one, and not one of them would have any value at all if they did not interest some one that sees it. For that reason I would never keep a painting if somebody wanted it more than I.

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Reviews

THE SUGGESTIONS OF JOSE MANUEL GOMEZ
Fabio Fournier (Director of the Central American University (UACA) of Costa Rica)

Henry Bergson once said that all matter is imbued with an "élan de vivre", a life impulse. When talking to José Manuel Gómez and hearing from him how the anxiety of a painting seizes him, how he dreams about it, how he perceives it, how he conceives it; those words of the great French philosopher comes to mind.

Perhaps in an inverse sense, like the subtlest expression of life, which is the dream, the poetry, the pure idea, gives rise to the literary or artistic work like a materialisation from that process of thought and initial emotion. And then one reasons as Calderón, "that all life is dream...". But, allow me a corollary in counterpoint: that the dreams are the life, the one and only true life.

In the canvases of José Manuel, his dreams, his innermost deep emotions, the same soul of the painter, goes to the encounter of the beings and the imagined things to give life to them. It is as thus that his most intimate experiences are defined by the magic of the line, the form and the colour

In the paintings of José Manuel, his horizons move away, disappear, and are lost in the infinity. His clouds escape their true dimension and they seem to fill the sky to us of realities. They are impregnated with colour, with form, with humidity and they make us have a feeling of rain and the appearance of life.

All these oil paintings catch the emotion and the thought of the observer, who loses the notion of the space and time in which he lives. His spirit is transported to the landscape, to the moment and to the atmosphere that the brush of the painter shaped on the canvas.

It is not realistic painting. It is mystic and poetry, dream painting. Sometimes it is saturated with a fine irony or a carrier of a message of deep philosophy. And thus the cathedral is born breaking the rocks of the Earth’s crust and it rises from the depth of the abysses towards the light. Intact its stone embroiders.

The brush continues describing the soul of the stones, the soul of the cathedral and the mysterious communion that exists between them. Between the stone and the perishable mortar, the immortal spirit who escapes, reveals itself to be locked up within the four walls of an architectural creation, a style, or mysticism. He always ascends searching for the infinite.

The painter has dreamt the reasons for his paintings. Then, he has expressed them in a clear and precise language, of impeccable form and of a strange luminosity.

José Manuel, who dominates to the form and the colour to perfection, only uses them to introduce them into a dream world.

Bewitched, surprised, we always travelled through an unreal universe, sometimes ironic, sometimes philosophical in others, suggestive. In front of his paintings, we feel the nostalgia of a dream pregnant with memories, of distant sorrows of and joys, of the discovery that we were on the verge of making in the shadows of the subconscious mind. Nevertheless, I am going to have to express the value that for me represents, in any work of art, or perhaps better that, which definitively is needed in any artistic work, its capacity of suggestion.

When the drawing and the colour make us feel something that is beyond that which the work shows at first sight, when it suggest to us beings, atmospheres, emotions and yearnings, unquestionably we are under the spell of the author who insinuates thoughts to us that are not in the same work of art, but beyond the work itself.

If I am in the certain and if this faculty of suggestion is in truth a manifestation of the essence of art, of the capacity of the great artists, is no doubt that José Manuel Gómez is one of them. All his work is impregnated with that suggestive power. All his paintings say so much more than what the painter, in form and colour, made tangible. They have a message of love, tenderness or warm humour that smile before the innumerable absurdness of Man, in front of so and so much ideology that would condemn a clear logic; like seeing the marvellous dreams of the angels, susceptible to the same tragedies that affect Man.

THE LEGEND OF THE SPANISH HORSE
Javier Rubio Nomblot (Art critic, writer and journalist Licensed in B.B.A.A.)

His paintings surprised me when I saw them: some of you will remember the Hieronymus Bosch, dreamlike, style of José Manuel Gómez, as it was seen in Madrid in the Heller Gallery exhibition of 1991, but perhaps you have never been able to contemplate his paintings of horses, since most of them have been exhibited, throughout the last years, in America. These paintings do not anymore show the desolate landscapes populated with unusual personages - some of them, time travellers projected magically from one time to another - but rather a series of interiors, - clearly influenced by Velazquez, all of them baroque in any case -, in which something similar to a legend is being developed, an alchemistic operation, which meaning and importance for the history of Spain and the affirmation of its culture, should not be overlooked.

José Manuel Gómez visited the sombre estancia landholdings, in which nothing has changed through the ages, documented himself, dreamed and perhaps he watched, hidden amongst the shadows, that, which he now shows us in his paintings. It is not difficult for us to imagine the artist’s passion for painting and for horses (after all, they have not been a very frequent subject in his previous work). In addition to his paintings, what captivated me was his erudition, that rare fluidity of speech, that rich vocabulary, all those ideas that are later on reflected in his paintings: they belong to any and all time, they speak to us of diverse forms of understanding painting, of history and of myths, and in them it is left patent that the painter knows and dominates the techniques of the old and the modern masters, be they Flemish painters, baroque Spaniards or expressionists of the School of Paris.

Thus, not very often, have we seen, behind a painting, so much effort, so much illusion and courage: José Manuel Gomez’s paintings rise majestically from the quick sands of the autodidacts to wisdom, knowledge, simplicity and perfection. Those that know me know of my distrust towards the self-taught person but also of my conviction that he also can be like a pearl, when he manages to survive his own virtues, knows how to put to test and to let even his innermost go and to approach with humility, the masters. In the erudition of José Manuel Gómez, in his seriousness and in his wide-open aims, is where one finds the secret of this victory.

CORDOBA MEANS ART: JOSE MANUEL GOMEZ (oniric)
AM Campoy (Member of the Asociation Internacional des Critiques D'Artes (París) and Royal Academy of Art)

In order to go back – even going into exile one could say - to a past time in the history of art, it is necessary to be in possession of effective and convincing expressive means – skills and imagination -, and to feel animated by a desire to create – to make come alive – and an ability of not falling into the temptation of mere imitation. In romantic literature, Sir Walter Scott came out convincing in this endeavour; in historical painting, however, it has only reached the “mise en scène” of a theatre evocation. José Manuel Gómez, who studied in Paris to become a painter, cradled in his dreams by Breton fairies (hallucinating himself in the legendary climates of Rennes, Vannes, Saint-Malo, guardians of arcane reminisces of the Duke Alain of Brittany, tutor of William the Conqueror), has made it real, clothed it, in images and gestures, a whole past populated with fantasies that fall like a refreshing shower in May on the too long drought of our times. His compositions are born from a coaxing spontaneity that releases them of any pompousness, and his painter’s hand frees them from any kinship with a mere illustrator.

Standing before these pictures one is reminded - without associating them to any parody - of the magical workshop of Hieronymus Bosch in Bois-him-Duc, of the Babel towers of Brueghel, of the characters of Van Aken. The epidermis of the paintings, their very texture, is of a literally pleasing Flemish sensuality, caused by such a well done joyous filling that the brush strokes resign their usual reference, to make possible the exact distribution of the colour, its transparencies... And how is it possible, this temperamental affinity between the Andalusian painter and his Gothic like inventions? It is, one should not forget, a very old affinity already present in the Andalusian art, both ingrained with a Germanic type discipline and immovability: a Nordic Ethos that almost always prevents the manifestation of the smiling Eros of the countries in the sun.

José Manuel Gómez, as a magician (a creator of forms, a painter), raises and makes come alive a world that we believed buried for always in the museums.

JOSE MANUEL GOMEZ
OR THE FASCINATION FOR THE MYSTERIES (oniric)
Manuel Gahete (Poet)

An energised halo of nostalgia illuminates with a pale and glowing light the Gothic paintings of the artist from the city of Malaga, by conviction a universal painter, by his own hand; a cosmic breath of imprisoned beauty and, not because of this, less calm or rapturous.

In the revelation of dreams, José Manuel intensifies the fantasy of the soul; a dream without limits that seems to lead to the tragedy of heroes, the chimera of conquerors, to the herbicide reality of the last shores of childhood where everything seems possible; a dream that dreams itself as if thus emulating the eternal utopia of the grave poets of the unexpected thought: Calderon, Apollinaire, Bergamin, Lorca.

I follow in the open books of his paintings, their chasms and peaks, the signs of the life that José Manuel Gómez squanders and illuminates, without allowing a single beat of the heart to harbour the possibility of any hope. Between the tenderness and the irony, the sincerity and the crudity, the creator turns into some strange Etruscan Haruspice of the human secrets. From the impenetrable simplicity of a dusk, or a dawn after a sleepless night, to the most cryptic spaces of a new mythology of strange gods, José Manuel never questions us; he lets the sea penetrate our eyes and the cold sea weed sink it’s sheltered heat into our bones.

José Manuel Gómez makes it clear to us, from the concave mirror of his illustrious imagination and reflects in that paradox of being, the history of Man with the untamed sign that not even slavery puts down; like the bold horse among the shadows, symbol of freedom, of power, of authority, of beauty. Horses of the light that burns and darkens the settings of ancestral rites, powerful and tame, humble and imperious, separate from common necessities, from suspicious eyes, from the distrustful threat of forgetfulness, from the cloudy armour of death. Horses, angels, the Pegasus, men invested by that light recorded in the inner skin of the mysteries that only the creators are able to transgress without staining or causing a wound; in the same way that turned into beings of light, nothing or nobody can pierce them.

 A BIT OF HISTORY
Javier Rubio Nomblot (Art critic, writer and journalist Licensed in B.B.A.A.)

More or less a year ago, while I was researching documents in order to write a prologue to an exhibition that on the occasion of the International Year of the Horse was held in the city of Jerez de la Frontera (and in which, of course, our painter was present), I verified with certain astonishment that the grand book on the Horse in Spanish Art, from Altamira to Barceló is still not written or published although, like anyone will be able to immediately sense, would be a subject for a splendid work. The most complete book that I found corresponded to another exhibition, A Thousand Years of the Horse in the Hispanic Art, celebrated in the Royal Palace of Seville in 2001 and it was given to me by, who else, José Manuel Gómez, a painter of exquisite sensitivity and great connoisseur of the world of horses whom I met during his last individual exhibition in this same gallery.

Soon after the closing of the individual exhibition of José Manuel Gómez in this same gallery the book the History of the Carthusian Horses was published by his friend and admirer Juan Carlos Altamirano, which cover - a painting very similar to the Magician and which illustrations were the responsibility of our artist. The subject of this book and the previous one of Altamirano, the History and Origin of the Spanish Horse: the Royal Stables of Cordova, is important to understand a work that, at first sight, is centred on very concrete scenes and narrates – in a fable form, because some elements of those fantastic worlds always manage to find their way into these paintings, full of allusions to Hieronymus Bosch, which is a remnant of his paintings done in the eighties – a true story: no more than no less than the one of the origin of the Pure Spanish Race.

Using his knowledge of the history of the Spanish Horse, his fertile imagination and, of course, his wisdom as a painter, José Manuel Gómez travels through time until the stables of the Cartuja de Jerez, at the beginning of the XVIIIth Century. If the horse here is the centre of the compositions and appears surrounded by personages who take care of it and study it, and if it seems to shine under some zenith light, it is because each one of these horses was, at that moment, an authentic jewel: from the beginning of the XVIIth Century – a moment at which the equine cabin in Spain was in a such a sorry state that it was necessary to recur to a Royal Order for a systematic improvement of the race until the end of the XVIIIth Century, a long process that was developed in convents like the one of the Carthusian monks and that came to a conclusion with the birth of the pure Spanish race.

This history, which is often confused with the legend, has held a fascination, for many years, for José Manuel Gómez, who in his paintings recreates scenes of the breeding, the care, the analysis and the inventory, under the kind glance of the monks, of those splendid horses. And in fact José Manuel Gómez paints these animals as nobody has ever done it: from the precise knowledge of each one of those details of their anatomy and their expression that differentiate them from other races and which make them unique.

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