Porrilló

ARTIST

Born in the village of Tubilla del Lago, Burgos, José Luis Abajo Fernández –better known as Porrilló– made Bilbao his home at an early age. It is there where he studied art and showed his work to the public for the first time, doing so at Windsor Gallery, the oldest of the Basque Country, whose doors closed in 2017.

After spending several years in Bilbao’s more industrialized area, he decided to exchange the industrial environment for a more natural one on the outskirts of the city, where he built a house with his own studio. Exchanging tenebrous Bilbao for a cleaner place, made Porrilló especially sensitive to perceiving and mastering light. His work has even been compared to that of the great European masters of the eighteenth century.

Beginning in 1979, he began to combine his exhibitions in the Basque Country with others in Madrid and several other locations in Spain. Still, he did not receive international recognition until 1989, when he obtained a Certificate of Excellence in the Gen Ten International Competition of Osaka.the next year, in the prestigious competition’s nineteenth edition, Porrilló once again outdid himself by being awarded a Medal of Honor – the highest award. these recognitions shot off his fame and prestige, and he was invited to exhibit his work at the house where Diego Rivera was born in Guanajuato, Mexico, as well as in several French cities. During that time, he traveled around Europe to study the Dutch school of painting in detail – especially the work of Rembrandt, one of the artists that has most influenced his technique.

In 1997, his paintings crossed the Atlantic by being put on display in an exhibition at the well-known Montserrat Gallery of New York. Since then, his career has done nothing but grow, and today his paintings and sculptures are present in numerous public and private collections. His Matterist vision, which puts the plasticity of elements in order with a manifest aesthetic sense, as well as his way of dissecting his works through a violent contrast of light, are clues to help viewers know that the painting is his. His artistic style has evolved, passing through Impressionism, Realism, Expressionism, Naïve Art, Naïve Surrealism, and Tenebrism until arriving at a new style of Matter Painting, based on earth, ashes, eggs, bark, straw, and other organic elements. Porrilló’s work, which is currently on display at El Patio Studio in Bilbao’s Art District, provides a good opportunity to discover the darkness of the past under the city’s new light.