In a conversation with Javier Díaz Guardiola, Julio Anaya recollects that he began his project “doing interventions in the abandoned, inhospitable, and decadent, routine haunts of the world of graffiti. In them I would represent paintings considered to be icons of the History of Art as trompe-l’oeils, carrying out an exercise of desacralization, taking the artworks out of the museum and relocating them in other places. Places stripped of the attributes of the museum such as protection, conservation and perpetuation of the work of art, thus producing a set of new meanings.” This artist posits, in this manner, a shift between the institution of the museum and the space deprived of qualities of the street, of the masterpieces to graffiti, inscribing the powerladen iconography of tradition upon found materials such as wooden boards, chunks of plasterboard, and, particularly, cardboard. His aesthetic program has many points of contact with the dialectic of place and noplace, having, perhaps, even greater affinity with Perejaume than with Robert Smithson, seeing that he is not trying to act like an “enthropologist” but as a strange “collector,” looking for energy not so much in the abandoned mines but in what we could could the abandon of history.

This iconic shift or detournement of Julio Anaya is built upon an untimely attitude, in the Nietzschean meaning of the term, avoiding the “historical disease” (which has surrendered to an epigonism while suffocating the possibility for any new incident with their monumental, antiquated, or critical attitude) and reframing representations in an age of collective amnesia. With residual materials it traces a kind of “return of the repressed” which amounts, in some cases, to bringing representations to the stage they purported to capture like he did, for instance, in the project “Paisaje, entorno y contexto” curated by Jaun Francisco Rueda for the Genalguacil Pueblo Museo: “In it,” points out Julio Anaya, “I was representing as trompe-l’oeil a painting of Jenaro Pérez Villaalmil, a Spanish Romantic painter, a work titled Vistas del castillo de Gaucín, which can be found in the Prado Museum. The place where I carried out this intervention located the spectator so that they could contemplate the representation and the represented, given that from the viewpoint of Genalguacil one could glimpse at the towers of said castle.”

In 2020, Julio Anaya produced in the Yusto Gallery/Giner de Marbella the exhibition Before 1881 which, according to his own statements, was inspired by the exhibition El sur de Picasso which he was able to see at the Picasso Museum of Málaga: “I was very interested in the way the influences of the Andalusians masters were mapped over the work of Picasso, and I loved,” says this young Andalusian artist, “the inclusion of works by Velázquez, Zurbarán…. Standing in front of these works I tried to imagine what kind of image somebody coming from a different country at that time would have of our culture. I didn’t want to drag the stereotypes with me, so I reduced the thematic spectrum to three specific subjects: landscape, religious painting, and costumbrismo. From then on, I went looking for works at La Aduana, at the Patrimony Museum, the Carmen Thyssen Museum, and at the very Picasso Museum. The title makes reference to the date of birth of Picasso, because, though he is not present in the exhibition, everything starts with him.” Julio Anaya is facing with courage the anxiety of influences, deploying the subtle revisionist coefficient of the clinamen2 which brings emblematic works of painting of tradition to residual surfaces. These “copies,” or, rather, these recreations adopt the material imperfections, but moreover take into consideration the field of recontextualization be it the graffiti-covered wall or the clinical walls of the gallery or the museum. A post-Póvera sensibility blends here with lucidly appropriationist strategies, which allows him, with absolute effortlessness, to paint again Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way, or “sediment” his version of Caspar David Friedrich’s Cairn in the Snow on a box for transporting bottles of Coca-Cola. Without a doubt, in his perverse passion for the frame of art he picks up on the “inhe- ritance” of the Duchampian ready-made and the obsession for the vulgar trans- formed into extraordinary that we find in Warhol.