Juan Araujo. A través is the catalog of the exhibition of the same title held at the CGAC from July to September 2008.
The Araujo exhibition at the CGAC is the result of an invitation and a commission for the artist to approach Álvaro Siza's building and its surroundings, thereby generating a group of works that would be directly related to the CGAC, to details of its architecture, to its Bonaval gardens and to its pub-lications, leaflets and invitations. The result is a group of works produced during 2007 and 2008 in which the strategies employed are very similar to those in previous groups: the attention he pays to a series of fragments of the building's architecture, the care he lavishes on details of the building or a selection of cat-alogues, the rigorous organisation reflecting an idea of seriality and the aesthetics that are the result of copying photographs, to mention but a few. These recent paintings, all done over the last two years, constitute the bulk of this solo exhibition, titled A través, but they are accompanied by a representative sample of works from earlier series, such as those devoted to the houses designed by Bo Bardi, to the Casa das Canoas and Casa Caoma or to the Coloritmos suite, in which buildings are the subject of study and analy-sis, and fragments and architectural details occupy a centralposition. Documentation, in theformofdetails, photographs, plans and models, is without doubt the most important feature of the paintings inspired by the CGAC, which provide a new perspective from which to rethink this exquisite building designed by Álvaro Siza in the late nineteen-eighties, a building which has become an emblem of modern art and a symbol of the modernisation and harmonisation with other nations in our cultural environment that took place after the end of Franco's dictatorship and the period of transition towards democracy.