José María Cano
Encyclopedia
José María Cano is a Spanish composer, once a member of the Spanish pop group Mecano
, and more recently a conceptual artist.
gave his first concerts as a university student in Madrid. There, he met Ana Torroja
, who became the lead singer for the pop group Mecano
. Their first album, also baptised Mecano (1981) and produced with financial backing of his father, included the hit "Hoy no me puedo levantar". Both José and his brother Nacho composed songs for all their albums
In 1984, José began to play piano and changed his method of composition. He began to compose for other singers, such as Ana Belén
, Amaya Uranga
, Sara Montiel
, Julio Iglesias
, Miguel Bosé
, Alaska
, Françoise Hardy
, Sara Brightman, Simone
, Mario Frangoulis
etc. He composed some of the most important songs in Spanish language such as Hijo de la luna
, Lia
, Mujer contra mujer, Me cuesta tanto olvidarte, Aire
, Tiempo de vals
, Cruz de navajas, Naturaleza muerta, Una rosa es una rosa and several others that have versions in other languages by various well known singers.
After Mecano broke up in 1992, he composed an opera, Luna, which was recorded with Plácido Domingo
in the leading role. This was not a commercial success.
In 2007 José participated, with his brother and Ana Torroja, in a festival held in Madrid
during an anti-drug campaign, in what one of José's paintings, the named Take a walk on the wild side, was auctioned. The artwork depicts the actress Sonia Martínez
who died 1994 as a result of her heroin addiction.
That exhibit, entitled, "This Is Just Business", appropriated its imagery from the letters of his divorce and mixed with drawings of his son. He painted the most aggressive letters from his wife's lawyers on backgrounds, which resemble desert or icy landscapes, that, when combined with drawings of his son, attempted to re-contextualize the lawyer's letters, the purpose of which were to damage Cano's reputation in the midst of a contentious divorce. This work, painted meticulously by him and hung on the wall took, attempted to undermine the power of those letters. In other words, a letter on his desk which might make you think he was a despicable person, when painted and hung on his dining room wall might made you consider whether the person who wrote it who was despicable, rather Cano himself. Because his divorce took place at the same time as the Iraq war while he painted the letters of his divorce he also painted pictures about the war. He saw a rhythmic parallelism between the two events which coincided in time, namely a confrontation with economic undertones against a so-called enemy and where innocent people suffered the consequences, especially children. His paintings with drawings of his son are also from this era. Monochromatic drawings on a sheet of paper. Simple but conceptually very interesting.
Around this same time Cano started on a series of work where he projected drawings done by his son Daniel, who has Asperger's syndrome. Cano copied them meticulously on a large scale, viewing these works as an exercise in humility, where the father understood that he had to copy the son as opposed to the son copying the father. Later he began to paint newspaper headlines and articles, continuing to explore his perspective that the truth is only true until someone tells it. He has pictures, for example, with titles such as "Immigration Brings More Crime", where the expression of what is most likely a verifiable fact hides a xenophobic attitude of some of the heads of the English press.
His first exhibition on the world of finance, "The Wall Street 100"', took place in early 2006. Based on newspaper clippings taken directly from the Wall Street Journal, Cano painstakingly reproduced the small hedcut
s portraits and surrounding column text in each clipping in large scale using colored waxes (encaustic painting). Reproducing these generic looking mass-produced portraits in wax was Cano's attempt to create authentic monuments with a three-dimensional effect and ironically express his opinion that these people were the new Venus-Aphrodites, and therefore he as a painter was obliged to affirm this beauty. As Hugo Rifkind
wrote in an article in The Times
newspaper art pages, "Cano's pictures surface has a translucent depth so that they are more like sculptures than paintings".
At the same time as painting characters from the financial world, he also painted statistics of the performance of the financial markets and the stocks of specific companies. He called this series of statistics "Mountains", considering them to be the new landscapes a painter should paint. Painting characters from the financial world and statistics instead of Venus-Aphrodites and landscapes allowed him to reconcile himself with traditional painting, which he does not renounce in spite of the conceptual nature of his work. In fact his series of bullfight etchings called "La Tauromaquia" had been shown at the Fine Art Museum of Hanoi and at the Picasso foundation in Málaga with the Goya and Picasso series of the same name, in the show "La Tauromaquia".
In spite of his technical preparation, Cano's work up to the present day has basically been conceptual. He works academically with a variety of labor-intensive art technics such as encaustic
on canvas for his paintings, watercolor on paper for his drawings, or aquatint
on copper plate for his etchings. Writing about him in the Architectural Digest
, Cristina Gimenez says: "At a time when almost no artists draw, he converts this discipline into the central tenet of his work: black lines on a white background: With ink on paper or encaustic on canvas (an ancient technique using wax as a pigment binder) his production is impeccable and the effects are spectacular." Based on images which are originally newspaper cut-outs or photographs, he uses the contemporary techniques of appropriation as an aim to navigate the space between reality and truth. His favourite saying is by the painter Torres García, who said, "Reality has three dimensions, whilst truth has only two." The majority of his works are in black and white, and he extends Torres García's phrase in the sense that reality is multicoloured, whilst we tend to represent the truth in black and white. For him it is a scale of greys. He does not see black and white as a bi-chromatic reality, but as intervention and non-intervention. He converts the white background of his works on wax into an ether, a void on which he intervenes or does not intervene, in such a way that the three-dimensional or multicoloured reality becomes his work, not just in the two-dimensional reality, but in a one-dimensional reality consisting of intervention or non-intervention. As said by art critic Anthony Haden-Guest
in his Financial Times
column, Cano recreates the images meticulously applying seven layers of wax, in a process that may take up to a thousand hours per work.
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
Mecano
Mecano was a Spanish pop band whose debut coincided with La Movida Madrileña , a sociocultural movement that occurred in Madrid, Spain during the 1980s...
, and more recently a conceptual artist.
Biography as a musician
Cano was born in MadridMadrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
gave his first concerts as a university student in Madrid. There, he met Ana Torroja
Ana Torroja
Ana Torroja is a Grammy Award-nominated Spaniard singer. She is the lead singer of the pop trio Mecano, considered one of the most popular pop bands from Spain during the 1980s and 1990s. Mecano split in 1998 and she embarked on a solo career.-Biography:Ana Torroja met José María Cano while...
, who became the lead singer for the pop group Mecano
Mecano
Mecano was a Spanish pop band whose debut coincided with La Movida Madrileña , a sociocultural movement that occurred in Madrid, Spain during the 1980s...
. Their first album, also baptised Mecano (1981) and produced with financial backing of his father, included the hit "Hoy no me puedo levantar". Both José and his brother Nacho composed songs for all their albums
In 1984, José began to play piano and changed his method of composition. He began to compose for other singers, such as Ana Belén
Ana Belén
Ana Belén is the artistic name of María del Pilar Cuesta Acosta, a Spanish actress and singer. She was born on 27 May 1951 in Madrid.- Biography :...
, Amaya Uranga
Amaya Uranga
Amaya Uranga Amezaga is a Spanish singer, best known for the fifteen years she spent as a member of the Basque folk/pop sextet Mocedades. She is a cousin of director Pablo Berger.-Biography:...
, Sara Montiel
Sara Montiel
Sara Montiel is a Spanish singer, and actress. She is still a much-loved and internationally known name in the Spanish-speaking movie and music industries....
, Julio Iglesias
Julio Iglesias
Julio José Iglesias de la Cueva , better known simply as Julio Iglesias, is a Spanish singer who has sold over 300 million records worldwide in 14 languages and released 77 albums. According to Sony Music Entertainment, he is one of the top 15 best selling music artists in history,...
, Miguel Bosé
Miguel Bosé
Miguel Dominguín Bosé is a Latin Grammy-winning Spanish/Italian musician and actor.-Early life:Bosé was born in San Fernando Hospital in Panama City, Panama, the son of the famous Italian actress Lucia Bosé and the legendary bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín. He is also a cousin of Carmen...
, Alaska
Alaska (singer)
Alaska is a Spanish - Mexican singer, dj, and TV personality famous in Spain and Latin America. She was of the main characters in the so called Movida the cultural movement following the Franco dictatorship in Spain...
, Françoise Hardy
Françoise Hardy
Françoise Madeleine Hardy is a French singer, actress and astrologer. Hardy is an iconic figure in fashion, music and style. She is married to the singer and movie actor Jacques Dutronc.-Biography:...
, Sara Brightman, Simone
Simone (actress)
Simone is a Broadway actress/singer and the daughter of Nina Simone.Prior to her acting career, Simone served in the United States Air Force as an engineering assistant...
, Mario Frangoulis
Mario Frangoulis
Mario Frangoulis is a Greek tenor and is best known for his song, "Vincerò, Perderò". He sings in Italian, Spanish, English, French, and Greek; he is fluent in all 5 languages.-Early life:...
etc. He composed some of the most important songs in Spanish language such as Hijo de la luna
Hijo de la Luna
"Hijo de la Luna" is a song written by José María Cano performed originally by the Spanish band Mecano with lead singer Ana Torroja. It appeared on their 1986 album, Entre el cielo y el suelo and had great success all over the Spanish speaking world, as did the album...
, Lia
Lia
Lia is a feminine given name. It may be a variant of Leah or a diminutive of various names including Amelia, Cornelia, Ophelia, Rosalia, Natalia or Aurelia.-People with the name Lia:* Lia , Japanese singer...
, Mujer contra mujer, Me cuesta tanto olvidarte, Aire
Aire
- Rivers :*River Aire, a river in Yorkshire, England*Aire , a river in the Ardennes département, northern France*Aire River , a river in the Canton of Geneva, in Switzerland*Aire River , a river in Australia- Towns :...
, Tiempo de vals
Tiempo de Vals
Tiempo de Vals is the fifth album by Chayanne released in 1990. The album was the third released on the Sony Music label, and featured successful singles four singles that reach on Billboards Hot Latin Tracks chart: "Completamente Enamorados" , "Daría Cualquier Cosa", "Simon Sez" Tiempo de Vals ...
, Cruz de navajas, Naturaleza muerta, Una rosa es una rosa and several others that have versions in other languages by various well known singers.
After Mecano broke up in 1992, he composed an opera, Luna, which was recorded with Plácido Domingo
Plácido Domingo
Plácido Domingo KBE , born José Plácido Domingo Embil, is a Spanish tenor and conductor known for his versatile and strong voice, possessing a ringing and dramatic tone throughout its range...
in the leading role. This was not a commercial success.
In 2007 José participated, with his brother and Ana Torroja, in a festival held in Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
during an anti-drug campaign, in what one of José's paintings, the named Take a walk on the wild side, was auctioned. The artwork depicts the actress Sonia Martínez
Sonia Martínez
Sonia Martínez was a Spanish actress and TV introducer, known by her role in the Spanish version of American educational TV broadcast 3-2-1 Contact aimed to spread Science through 12-14 year old audiences...
who died 1994 as a result of her heroin addiction.
Biography as an artist
José María Cano began drawing at a very young age. From the age of 10, he attended the Rafael Hidalgo de Caviedes academy, followed by the Artaquio academy, in order to learn how to draw and paint in preparation for an architectural career. During his first-year architecture studies he learned to master encaustic with his shape analysis professor, who was a painter. He began to work professionally in 2002, although his first exhibition came in 2004 in Craig Robins’ Private Space, commissioned by Ambra Medda. Mexican gallery owner Ramis Barquet saw this exhibition and commissioned his first commercial exhibition.That exhibit, entitled, "This Is Just Business", appropriated its imagery from the letters of his divorce and mixed with drawings of his son. He painted the most aggressive letters from his wife's lawyers on backgrounds, which resemble desert or icy landscapes, that, when combined with drawings of his son, attempted to re-contextualize the lawyer's letters, the purpose of which were to damage Cano's reputation in the midst of a contentious divorce. This work, painted meticulously by him and hung on the wall took, attempted to undermine the power of those letters. In other words, a letter on his desk which might make you think he was a despicable person, when painted and hung on his dining room wall might made you consider whether the person who wrote it who was despicable, rather Cano himself. Because his divorce took place at the same time as the Iraq war while he painted the letters of his divorce he also painted pictures about the war. He saw a rhythmic parallelism between the two events which coincided in time, namely a confrontation with economic undertones against a so-called enemy and where innocent people suffered the consequences, especially children. His paintings with drawings of his son are also from this era. Monochromatic drawings on a sheet of paper. Simple but conceptually very interesting.
Around this same time Cano started on a series of work where he projected drawings done by his son Daniel, who has Asperger's syndrome. Cano copied them meticulously on a large scale, viewing these works as an exercise in humility, where the father understood that he had to copy the son as opposed to the son copying the father. Later he began to paint newspaper headlines and articles, continuing to explore his perspective that the truth is only true until someone tells it. He has pictures, for example, with titles such as "Immigration Brings More Crime", where the expression of what is most likely a verifiable fact hides a xenophobic attitude of some of the heads of the English press.
His first exhibition on the world of finance, "The Wall Street 100"', took place in early 2006. Based on newspaper clippings taken directly from the Wall Street Journal, Cano painstakingly reproduced the small hedcut
Hedcut
Hedcut is a term referring to a style of drawing, associated with The Wall Street Journal half-column portrait illustrations. They use the stipple method of many small dots and the hatching method of small lines to create an image, and are designed to emulate the look of woodcuts from old-style...
s portraits and surrounding column text in each clipping in large scale using colored waxes (encaustic painting). Reproducing these generic looking mass-produced portraits in wax was Cano's attempt to create authentic monuments with a three-dimensional effect and ironically express his opinion that these people were the new Venus-Aphrodites, and therefore he as a painter was obliged to affirm this beauty. As Hugo Rifkind
Hugo Rifkind
Hugo Rifkind is a columnist for The Times and The Spectator and the son of MP and former Conservative and Unionist Cabinet Minister, Sir Malcolm Rifkind.-Early life and education:...
wrote in an article in The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
newspaper art pages, "Cano's pictures surface has a translucent depth so that they are more like sculptures than paintings".
At the same time as painting characters from the financial world, he also painted statistics of the performance of the financial markets and the stocks of specific companies. He called this series of statistics "Mountains", considering them to be the new landscapes a painter should paint. Painting characters from the financial world and statistics instead of Venus-Aphrodites and landscapes allowed him to reconcile himself with traditional painting, which he does not renounce in spite of the conceptual nature of his work. In fact his series of bullfight etchings called "La Tauromaquia" had been shown at the Fine Art Museum of Hanoi and at the Picasso foundation in Málaga with the Goya and Picasso series of the same name, in the show "La Tauromaquia".
In spite of his technical preparation, Cano's work up to the present day has basically been conceptual. He works academically with a variety of labor-intensive art technics such as encaustic
Encaustic
Encaustic may refer to:*Encaustic painting*Encaustic tile...
on canvas for his paintings, watercolor on paper for his drawings, or aquatint
Aquatint
Aquatint is an intaglio printmaking technique, a variant of etching.Intaglio printmaking makes marks on the matrix that are capable of holding ink. The inked plate is passed through a printing press together with a sheet of paper, resulting in a transfer of the ink to the paper...
on copper plate for his etchings. Writing about him in the Architectural Digest
Architectural Digest
Architectural Digest is an American monthly magazine. Its principal subject is interior design, not — as the name of the magazine might suggest — architecture more generally. The magazine is published by Condé Nast Publications and was founded in 1920, by the Knapp family, who sold it in 1993...
, Cristina Gimenez says: "At a time when almost no artists draw, he converts this discipline into the central tenet of his work: black lines on a white background: With ink on paper or encaustic on canvas (an ancient technique using wax as a pigment binder) his production is impeccable and the effects are spectacular." Based on images which are originally newspaper cut-outs or photographs, he uses the contemporary techniques of appropriation as an aim to navigate the space between reality and truth. His favourite saying is by the painter Torres García, who said, "Reality has three dimensions, whilst truth has only two." The majority of his works are in black and white, and he extends Torres García's phrase in the sense that reality is multicoloured, whilst we tend to represent the truth in black and white. For him it is a scale of greys. He does not see black and white as a bi-chromatic reality, but as intervention and non-intervention. He converts the white background of his works on wax into an ether, a void on which he intervenes or does not intervene, in such a way that the three-dimensional or multicoloured reality becomes his work, not just in the two-dimensional reality, but in a one-dimensional reality consisting of intervention or non-intervention. As said by art critic Anthony Haden-Guest
Anthony Haden-Guest
Anthony Haden-Guest is a British-American writer, reporter, cartoonist, art critic, poet, and socialite who lives in New York and London. He is a frequent contributor to major magazines and has had several books published.-Family:...
in his Financial Times
Financial Times
The Financial Times is an international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and printed in 24 cities around the world. Its primary rival is the Wall Street Journal, published in New York City....
column, Cano recreates the images meticulously applying seven layers of wax, in a process that may take up to a thousand hours per work.
Selected exhibitions
2004- 50 Shark Teeth, Comisariado por Ambra Medda, Craig Robin's Private Space, Design District at Miami Art Basel, Miami.
2005
- Todos Somos Diferentes,Galería Ramis Barquet, MonterreyMonterreyMonterrey , is the capital city of the northeastern state of Nuevo León in the country of Mexico. The city is anchor to the third-largest metropolitan area in Mexico and is ranked as the ninth-largest city in the nation. Monterrey serves as a commercial center in the north of the country and is the...
, México.
2006
- Mural de la sufragista Clara Campoamor, para el Senado español, MadridMadridMadrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
. - Materialismo Matérico. Galería Project B, MilánMilanMilan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
. - José-María Cano: Paintings. Comisariado por Huang Azhong,Urban Museum, Shangai.
- Performance at the Jason Rhoades Memorial.Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles.
- WS 100. Comisariado por Carlota Alvarez Basso, Palacio de Sobrellano, ComillasCantabriaCantabria is a Spanish historical region and autonomous community with Santander as its capital city. It is bordered on the east by the Basque Autonomous Community , on the south by Castile and León , on the west by the Principality of Asturias, and on the north by the Cantabrian Sea.Cantabria...
, Spain. - Arte Urbano. Comisariado por Fernando Francés, Fundación Coca Cola, Arco 06, MadridMadridMadrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
. - Masturbation, Allsopp Contemporary, London.
2007
- Materialismo-Matérico. Comisariado por Julieta Manzano, CAC Málaga, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de MálagaMálagaMálaga is a city and a municipality in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, Spain. With a population of 568,507 in 2010, it is the second most populous city of Andalusia and the sixth largest in Spain. This is the southernmost large city in Europe...
. - Avatar of Sacred Discontent, Group Exhibition. Comisariado por Wolfe Lenkiewicz & Flora Fairbairn,9 Hillgate, London.
- Captain Thunder, Allsopp Contemporary, London.
2008
- Welcome to Capitalism,DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Exposición inaugural. PraguePraguePrague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
. - Mural para la Moscow World Fine Art Fair, Comisariado por Teresa Mavica, Moscow.
- Art Is a Waste of Time, Artists Anonymous Gallery, BerlínBerlínBerlín is a municipality in the Usulután department of El Salvador.-Overview:The municipality of Berlín is made up of an urban center and 17 cantons or villages...
. - London Calling,Kristy Stubbs Gallery, Group exhibition of London based artists, comisariado por Elaine Ferguson, Dallas.
- Heroes of Our Time, Regina Gallery, Moscow.
2009
- La tauromaquia, Riflemaker, comisariado por Tot Taylor, London.
- "God Sell the Queen", Sotheby's, London.
- The Wall Street One Hundred, The Dairy, comisariado por Virginia Damtsa, London.
2010
- Cartel de las Ferias de San Isidro, Feria del Aniversario y feria de Otoño para la plaza de toros de Las Ventas de Madrid.
- "La tauromaquia. Goya siglo XIX, Picasso siglo XX, Cano siglo XXI.", Grabados de toros.
- Museo de Bellas Artes de Vietnam (Baotang Mythuat), HanoiHanoiHanoi , is the capital of Vietnam and the country's second largest city. Its population in 2009 was estimated at 2.6 million for urban districts, 6.5 million for the metropolitan jurisdiction. From 1010 until 1802, it was the most important political centre of Vietnam...
. - Tauromaquias, Fundación Picasso, comisariada por Lourdes Moreno, MálagaMálagaMálaga is a city and a municipality in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, Spain. With a population of 568,507 in 2010, it is the second most populous city of Andalusia and the sixth largest in Spain. This is the southernmost large city in Europe...
. - Viewing City—Shanghai Intl Printmaking Exhibition 2010. Organizing: Guiding unit: China Artists Association Printmaking Art Committee Shanghai Hongqiao Contemporary Art Museum (No. 650, XianXia Road, ShanghaiShanghaiShanghai is the largest city by population in China and the largest city proper in the world. It is one of the four province-level municipalities in the People's Republic of China, with a total population of over 23 million as of 2010...
)
2011
- Charles Riva Collection, BrusselsBrusselsBrussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...
. - The way we are now, Comisariada por William Morrow. 21C Museum Cincinnati
External links
- josemariacano.net
- http://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/photography?SQ_PAINT_LAYOUT_NAME=chapter&start=949&end=1624&sgmt=76585 Photography freed art from being about money.