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ROYO Biography |
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From his academic formation at the San Carlos school of Fine Art in Valencia, right up to the present day, flourishing with full maturity, Royo’s painting has fluctuated between the first references taken from the Spanish tradition of Velazquez and Goya, and those found in the French Impressionist painters; Renoir, Monet or Degas, passing inescapably by the ‘magisterio del luminismo valenciano’ of Joaquin Sorolla, in a process of updating the studies of light and the free application of color which flooded European painting of the time.
As with the aforementioned painters, landscapes and portraits are the genres where we best find the plastic experimentation so typical of Royo, his interest in the possibilities of color and light as a vehicle, with the midday light of the Mediterranean as motif. Thus the reflective constants and color contaminations in the landscape, the light filtering through a lattice laden with vegetation, bathing fabrics or shimmering across the naked sin of shoulders laid bare with a vibrant intensity, capturing forms in an instantaneous manner in brushstrokes that seem to become unfastened, quick, subtle, short or lengthened, soft, pasted, twisted into contrasting stains and colored shades that define the figures. Everything - it is worth insisting upon - is tinted with the luminous sensuality of the Mediterranean. Royo’s models, captured in the serenity of a contemplative moment, insinuated with the natural grace of a sketch, in the arched profile of a dance, using the visual hedonism described by Renoir, the plastic carnality, the chromatic and material nature of its bathers, painted under the influence of a strong classicism from which there is no escape for Royo’s female figures either, more stylized, younger, more intimate. Women that resemble those painted by Claude Monet or Sorolla, in a garden, strolling beneath the sun, in the evening light through fields of poppies, or in a sun hat with a parasol being led to the seashore. Ladies protected beneath yellow sunshades which tinge their faces with color. Bright white dresses drenches in blues and ochres, violets and greens, whilst they flow in the gentle breeze in the light of the sun. |
