Juana Francés worked and lived in Alicante and later in Madrid. Initially self-taught, she studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. She devoted her career to researching the formats and resources of the pictorial medium, changing with ease between abstraction and figuration, which she understood as complementary, and not antagonistic positionings. She moved on from her early creations, which were figurative with large human presences, to an explicitly informalist phase in which she would become a member of the El Paso group, the only woman member of this art collective. Later, she would become implicated in a somewhat figurative period and delve deeper into the three-dimensional world with a feísta[1] appearance, to resume a vibrant, casual colouring in her final phase, which ultimately turned into a return to severe chromatism.
I.LL.
[1] Translator’s note: from feísmo, a genre celebrating the aesthetics of ugliness or grotesqueness