Jean Grangeot – critic
I will say it straight: Raúl Agrán cannot, in all objectivity, be compared to anyone but Raúl Agrán – meaning that his painting is the exteriorisation of the man himself. […]
There is an immense force that emanates from all of his work, unfettered and deliberate. […]
An artist-combatant, accomplished and naïve at the same time, whose work leaves no one unmoved.
Daniel Faugeron – writer
Agrán represents an impassioned awareness that real life exists, that it is right here in front of us in the essence of an interpretation of the peoples of the world – one people that has inhabited this earth for a billion years […].
To be armed with beauty, authenticity, intelligence and love: that is the work of Raúl Agrán […].
What purpose does the art of Raúl Agrán serve? Precisely to enable our species to survive. Agrán puts an end to isthmuses (“isms”). Beings are forced out of their confinement by his calm approach, his precision and assurance as an artist: this is the power of his medium. He is a master craftsman, a therapist for the future – it’s reassuring.
Denise Lachaud – psychoanalyst
Raúl does not aestheticise, he orchestrates. On a different stage that occupies the totality of the painted surface. Without scale. Raúl paints with passion – his passion. He summons his strength in a sometimes Wagnerian radiance of colours in which pain evokes pleasure. A miracle-worker. Alone. […]
Raúl paints the way one writes on the surface of the world. No current trend can enmesh itself in his work. A man, like any man, unique; he is part of the universal order of things. He is not a beetle on which we can pin the label of his century. He has never been caught in the quagmires of titles, accolades, glory or rivalries. He has experienced hardship, perhaps. Tragedy, misery – a state of destitution that an artist as pure as crystal has translated into a remarkable body of work whose precision has only enriched the incandescence of his heart.
The man, the artist, the painter, does not engage in theatrics. As a result, his work has long been neglected. He is lucid, proud, natural and real. A fortuitous encounter. […]
Everywhere, reflections lighten the shadows, the atmosphere is luminous.
Everywhere, there is sunshine, music, Latin undulations, impetuousness. Determination and self-possession. A prodigious harmony of forms, colours and innovative tones that are delicate and powerful. Noble. Within the complex world of his creations, in his spaces that are as mysterious as they are poetic and strange, there is Raúl.
— Extracts from L’art Mute
Jean-Paul Bourre – writer
Raúl Agrán is first and foremost guided by Beauty – like the painters of the Renaissance, whose works all seek to capture the sun. He defies trends and commercial expectations that impose the pursuit of “novelty at any cost”. For him, novelty lies in quality. […]
To find a response to Thomas Bernhard’s cold planet, all I need to do is contemplate the prolific work of Raúl Agrán – the way he plays with light and shadow – which is also the effervescence of all life’s passions. […]
Raúl Agrán is a magician, a creator of fireworks who sets Life ablaze in all its vivid colours and transforms it into a “streak of light”.
Henri Pemot – poet and essayist
Raúl Agrán’s painting reflects a vision of life that is drawn from the very source of beauty, as though to seek out purity, the absolute, the perfect, without sliding into a naïve disregard for the tangible world.
In this way, in his shifting images we discover the point of duality at which body and mind, reality and Surrealism meet. It is perhaps from this starting point that the painter invites us to plant the tree of plenitude. This is painting with a powerful spirituality and self-evident mysticism.
Jean Dominique Rey – poet and art critic
These works are the daughters of solitude. They exist only in the face of obstacles and as a result of a constant exploration of possibilities, of reveries and abysses. Here, uncompromising dreams rise up to confront the unknown; architectural forms structured by the imagination, mutations poured into the crucible of all potentialities that defy all boundaries. […]
These paintings, more than a commentary but as much as a poem, demand to be looked at and heard.
Like a moment of happiness
Like a struggle
Like pleasure
Gaetano Marcellino – poet
In Agrán’s paintings, there is no indulgence in formality or aesthetic compensation. They bear no stamp of visual tradition: traditions already known to us or those we expect to see for the thousandth time, when the techniques and functions of painting have become the institutions of the existing order of things. These paintings are not free zones, but, rather, zones discovered, those where we truly reside. […]
In this vibrant shared language in constant motion, Agrán articulates his paintings […]; it is here that something attracts our attention and surfaces, activating life.
— Extracts from À l’œil nu
Michel Berlemont – writer
All creative people pursue and complete the works of the past. Raúl Agrán is fully aware that while he is a direct heir of the pictorial revolution of the early 20th century, he also embraces his connection with his ancestors, from Caravaggio to Rubens, from Arabic calligraphy to the traditional paintings of his birthplace in Latin America, of Mediaeval Art to the drawings that Prehistoric people dared to trace on the walls of the earth.
Consequently, he is insensitive to the trends of dealers who think only of their market stalls, of the siren calls of power whose only concern is its own survival. Agrán rejects all trickery in his art; he does not seek complacent consensus. This is why his work is powerful, dynamic, full and complete. It is life itself in motion. […]
Artists like Agrán embrace life head-on, allowing it to flow into them, assimilating the everyday world, the ordinary things and the violent feelings of rebellion, experiences of love and despair. Painters of his calibre digest the reality of life with all their being, all their bodies. And, on the canvas, with their brushes and their colours, they strive to bring us light to fill the void of melancholy that plagues us.
Caroline Swysen – writer and filmmaker
The enchanting work of Raúl Agrán – his trances, or epiphanies? – gives rise to images that are both monstrous and speak with a poetry that is profoundly familiar. It is within this great paradox that his work resides, that it instils itself in us and triggers a reaction, creating a kind of second DNA chain that is not cellular but spiritual, which tirelessly whispers to us about our origins and our direction in a space without limits. It invites us on a meditative dance that takes us from Lascaux to an undetermined era. It is our decision whether or not to accept, to take a chance on it. […]
This painter is an inventor. He invents the form of that which is imprisoned within us – that which is elusive, beyond language and the cry of voices; this chaotic mass that is our most deeply-rooted and nameless inner core. This interlacing of sensations, thoughts, fleeting and densely-packed voids, fresh and luminous upsurges, filled with enthusiasm. He gives contours to these persistent silences that accompany our lives, shadows that too often affect us profoundly. […]
Raúl Agrán’s paintings are at once a synopsis of the history of art and an echo of a time of fragmentation, vertigo and solitude. […]
They take us beyond the debate between representation and abstraction. This threshold seems to have been definitively crossed, since History continues to unfold and those who paint are at the centre of the upheavals that shape it. In this progression, the work of Raúl Agrán is, and will remain, an essential link in the chain.