Miradas — Crossing Glances by Javier Montesol

Internationally-renowned Spanish painter Javier Montesol presents “Miradas – Crossing Glances,” a collection of more than 60 original pieces available for purchase at Descanso Gardens.

Javier Montesol is best known for his iconic paintings of Spanish dancers and depictions of Spanish culture. His work is included in numerous international collections, including Madrid’s Prado Museum, Museo Reina Sofia, and in private collections around the world. In Fall 2022, as part of the Sister Cities partnership of cultural exchange with Villanueva de la Cañada, La Cañada Flintridge hosted Montesol and introduced him to the people and culture of Southern California. He returns to Southern California in April and May 2023 to complete two projects.

Montesol’s first-ever California exhibit, Miradas – Crossing Glances, will debut at the historic Boddy House in Descanso Gardens where over 60 of his pieces will be offered for purchase, with a portion of the proceeds being donated to LCF Sister Cities. The exhibition will also feature a taste of Spanish culture with live flamenco dancers, Spanish music, Spanish wine, and light fare.

About the artist

Francisco Javier Ballester Guillén, better known as Javier Montesol, born in Barcelona in 1952, belongs to the Countercultural and Underground movement of the 1970s and began as a comic book artist participating in the creation of new Spanish comic magazines such as Star, Cairo, and El Víbora.

In the 1980s he became interested in painting and began to sell in a new and revolutionary format, in the Supermercado del Arte, where only once a year, at Christmas, the amateur and collector public could buy at a very good price works by well-known painters and cartoonists.

In 1992, he decided to settle in Brittany, France with his wife and 4 young children to devote himself exclusively to painting and exhibiting in Europe and the United States. A few years later, in 1999, he returned to Spain and settled in Villanueva de la Cañada, exhibiting regularly in art galleries around Madrid, Barcelona, Nantes, and Paris until 2011.

His work is present in numerous art collections such as CaixaBank’s, BBVA’s Foundation, Mercedes-Benz’s, Bullfighting Museum of Madrid, MNAC, Prado Museum, the Military Historical Museum of Spain, and private collections all around the world. In 2017, Prado Museum commissioned him a graphic novel about the nineteenth-century painter Mariano Fortuny which lead him to make contemporary versions of the painter, culminating in 2019 with the live painting of the Battle of Tetuan in the National Museum of Catalonia, Barcelona.