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- The return to the scene of Mecano
- The second life of José María Cano
Mask party at the José María Cano palace
"Hung from the sky for twelve cypresses, twelve apostles of green watch twelve months." As if it were a prophecy, the song that José María Cano wrote 35 years ago is now fulfilled. Not in the musical facet of who once was one of the three members of Mecano, the most celebrated group in the history of Spanish pop, but in the artistic one. Because now the apostles do not cover their letters, but their pictures. For two decades Cano is a renowned and renowned artist. A quarantine of exhibitions distributed all over the world, collective and individual, and the sale of their works in powerful auction houses confirm this.
From February 14 until March 1, Cano presents the Apostolate exhibition in the Sacristy of the Cathedral of Toledo. In it, these apostles dialogue with those of El Greco, but they look up instead of down. Faces of men of different age and condition that are based on friends like Alfonso de Borbón or the businessman Javier Hidalgo and even his own son, Daniel, 23 years old. As explained by her curator, Rosa Martínez, to EL PAÍS, "her iconographic references are not the painters of the past, whom she nevertheless studies in detail, but people from her surroundings, including her own son, who represents Saint John, because he sees in them the sufferings, struggles and moral qualities relevant to contemporary life. "
Cano has never stopped mixing his artist status with his own life. It feeds back. In fact, his first works were done with receipts, invoices and divorce documents from his son's mother. He paints using a technique called encaustic, where the color mixes with hot wax and creates thick strokes, "of great conceptual density," details Commissioner Martinez.
It is rare to see Cano's work - which he often signs with his last names, Cano de Andrés - in Spain. That unfair saying that no one is a prophet in his land is fulfilled. Beyond the famous mural of Clara Campoamor commissioned by the Government in 2006 for the Senate and a poster and then an exhibition in the bullring of Las Ventas in 2014, there is hardly any record of his artistic passage through his native country. After exhibiting in Prague, Beijing, London, Tokyo ... now his arrival in Toledo has been a surprise. "He has been constantly and directly involved in the installation of the works," says the curator of the exhibition, "because he is an absolute perfectionist who takes care of all the details, from the exact intensity of the light to the design of the frames, which in Toledo seems to be part of the sacristy furniture. "
Pictures of apostles hanging in a cathedral. An exhibition and such a space show that spirituality and religion are an intrinsic part of the life of José María Cano, who turned 61 on Friday, February 21. "He is very interested in Christianity as a humanist philosophy," the curator reflects. He began to create these paintings five years ago "as an internal introspection exercise, without haste, without even trying to finish them."
Before arriving in Toledo, the work was in San Diego (California), where he faced you with works by Velázquez and Murillo and also in Lisbon, where he talked with zurbaranes . In the Portuguese capital Cano spends long periods, in the palace that he owns - and that he bought in 2017 for 3.5 million euros - where he entertains his guests with masquerades and dances. But who knows him knows that he has no fixed destination. After passing through Toledo, he set sail for Australia, and then he will be able to return to that Portuguese house, or to the 1689 palace he owns in Malta, or to his house in Holland Park, one of the most beautiful areas of London, the same that inspired JM Barrie to write Peter Pan and that he bought it from the Duran Duran representative .
A huge wealth achieved by selling many records, 25 million, specifically, but also many paintings. And not just their own. At the end of the nineties, the losses caused by his opera Luna forced him to get rid of the barcelós , streams or sauras he had been buying thanks to Mecano's income. But he still had and left works of Warhol, Bourgeois, Bacon or Basquiat that he bought at a good price in his early days and that he conserves, with which he has been playing to get those properties.
His art has also given him joy. His ideas, as he himself has said, dance between the real and the true, playing between art and the empirical. That is why he paints portraits of world leaders in large format, imitating his photos in newspaper clippings. He also plays with prostitution leaflets, huge and made of wax, easily exceeding 50,000 euros in the Sotheby's house. Among his most famous creations are the portrait of Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, sold in April 2017 and for which he achieved almost 390,000 euros; or the charity he donated to the Starlite gala in Marbella last summer, organized by his friend Sandra García-Sanjuán, who raised 270,000.
Although controversies such as that of the past Operation Triunfo and the use of the word mariconez bring on occasion the spirit of Mecano, that group that neither poses nor discards returning; Although sometimes, as in the 2018 Latin Grammy, back on stage, all this has been left far behind in the life of a man who is more than just a composer, musician, singer or painter. A man who, beyond the economic or the expository, of a more than probable step to posterity, can be called a winner. Commissioner Rosa Martínez says it well: "The triumph, we know that it can be economic, social, historical. We know that there is another major triumph, which is that of coherence with oneself and with the truth itself. And that is what appears when it has already been traveled by everyone else, and when it is known that it also does not matter. "