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Artist career

The pictorial works of Vaquero are developed in the field of figuration, always going very deeply into materic properties. His search concentrates on the fundamental problems of light and space, and the duality that exists between flat space and three-dimensional space.

His gaze focuses on the elements that make up contemporary culture and knowledge, and he then represents this within symbolic spaces.
Julio Vaquero composes the objects and spaces inside his studio and then gives them a natural treatment in his painting, creating a dialogue between painting as a traditional representation and as an experience in the real space that has created it.

Read the Julio Vaquero’s biography

Work in museums and collections

  • Museu del Fútbol Club Barcelona, Barcelona.
  • Museo de Pintura de Valdepeñas, Ciudad Real.
  • Col·lecció Testimoni. La Caixa, Barcelona.
  • Col·lecció Editorial Planeta, Barcelona.
  • Col·lecció Ernesto Ventós, Barcelona.
  • Colección Hesperia, Madrid.
  • Colección Luis Infante, Madrid.
  • Cortes Regionales de Castilla-La Mancha, Toledo.
  • Fundació Sorigué, Lleida.
  • Fundación Lilly, Madrid.
  • Fundació Vila Casas, Barcelona

Quotations

  • Painting in space seems an impossible task. I imagine Julio Vaquero deep in thought with a brush poised in mid-air, furious because cold reality, with its cast-iron laws of physics, has thrown a fair few complications his way. And I also imagine him happy at having found the solution. He has done it. He is able to paint in space without the need for a canvas. He has subtracted that which is painted from painting. You only have to look at his work to see it.
    Juan Carlos Ortega
  • From my beginnings in the Faculty of Fine Arts in Barcelona, I work from reality, both in drawing and painting and sculpture. Reality has nuances that the brain can not improvise. I have the need for the material to have traces of my hands, that the craft part is visible. I need to experience objects, too violent, torture with hands and vision.
    Julio Vaquero
  • This Barcelona-based painter normally works with artificial light from spotlights, colour filters and neon lights, which is what creates the blue-violet tones that are so characteristic of his work. ln his pictorial works, Vaquero often combines oil-painting and tempera techniques, sometimes adding resins to enrich his work texturally Objects are recreated with the meticulous and striking realism of a great realist painter whilst the backgrounds are completed in the free-painting style of a true abstract painter, with bursts of chromatic contrast and flashes of dark light that fill the work with dramatic tension. The fabrics, cloths and curtains, with their creases and formless nature, represent the nexus between the real world of objects and the abstract world of vibrant backgrounds and bursts of light.
    Sergio Vila-Sanjuán
  • Julio Vaquero's work spans aspects of contemporary art that have seldom, if ever, been brought together previously. As will immediately be apparent to anyone who looks at his work, he is a distinguished inheritor of to the great Spanish realist tradition, especially as this applies to still life, in the work of artists such as Sánchez Cotán and Juan van der Hamen. While he is a gifted draugtsman of the human figure, as  works like "Torso oscuro" and "Cuerpo en forma de T" demonstrate, it is inanimate things that attract him most as subject-matter.
    Edward Lucie Smith

Writings