Don de lágrimas (Versión Nuestra Señora de la Oliva) (Gift for Tears [Version Our Lady of the Olive])

A self-taught artist, José Maldonado began his career in 1982 as an illustrator for magazines such as La Luna and Madrid Me Mata. In the late 1980s, he abandoned painting to begin exploring art as a machine for meaning, following the theoretical assumptions of critic José Luis Brea, who advocated art capable of expressing the crisis of representation. Maldonado participated in several of the key group exhibitions of the time, such as Los últimos días (The Last Days, 1992) in Seville and Anys 90. Distància zero (The 90s: Zero Distance, 1994) at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona, curated by Brea, as well as Historia natural. El doble hermético (Natural History: The Hermetic Double, 1992), curated by Manel Clot.
Don de lágrimas is based on Alonso Cano and his father, Miguel Cano’s altarpiece for Nuestra Señora de la Oliva de Lebrija. In his interpretation, Maldonado reduces the Counter-Reformation Baroque’s persuasive devotional and catechetical images to silent black paintings under glass: his interpretation speaks of the impossibility of finding any other content in the work than a melancholic echo of the viewer in its reflection. Maldonado himself wrote: ‘We live on alert; every time we look in the mirror, we appreciate the delicate work of death; after all, it is the most natural of acts that can be expected of us [...] the only event devoid of artifice’.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio