“Art escapes from everyday, trivial life to become something authentic and transcendent.” Roy Anglada
My meeting with Roy Anglada and Luis Torroba is one of those stories that could be used in any movie script. It was in the summer, in a restaurant where I went to eat with some friends and at the next table were the two artists with whom, shortly after, we engaged in a pleasant conversation about the art world.
What are the chances that the Universe will bring these artists together with me, that I have just opened the International Artists Club and that, two weeks later, I will be invited to lunch at Roy‘s house, which is also his professional atelier where I was able to see all his works?
The truth is that these types of stories have happened to me very frequently throughout my life and I believe that they are more than just coincidences.
One of his last exhibitions in September was at the Centro Cultural Casa de Vacas del Retiro, in Madrid. Under the name of “Quimera”, the homage works to national and international poets such as Lord Byron, Edgard Allan Poe, Federico García Lorca or Leopoldo García Panero attracted an admiring public of the artist from Madrid.
Composed of forty works, the exhibition was divided into two pictorials, “Los poetas malditos y Noúmeno”
One of the works corresponding to “Poetas Malditos”
“Noúmeno”, a pictorial composed of large format works
José Miguel Roy Anglada was born in 1955 in Madrid and soon began studying drawing and painting at a very early age, although the rest of his training has been self-taught. Since his first solo exhibition in Madrid, at the Sala El Búho, in 1979, he has offered numerous solo exhibitions, among which Roy Anglada. Pinturas, at the Museo Cortijo Miraflores in Marbella in 2006, Roy Anglada, held at the Sala Unicaja in Malaga in 2007 (with catalog), his last major individual presentation in an institutional framework in Madrid, entitled Entelequias, held at the Centro Municipal de las Artes de Alcorcón -on the occasion of which was published the monograph Roy Anglada. Entelequias (Madrid, Unicaja and Ayuntamiento de Alcorcón, 2009) with texts by, among others, the artist himself or the painter José Manuel Ciria (Manchester, 1960) -, Roy Anglada (IAC, at its Berlin and Bonn venues, 2010), Quimera (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos I, 2012) and Roy Anglada. Less is more, at Art Projects Gallery in Sotogrande in 2015. In 2016, he participated in the Art Marbella fair with the installation The Dark Cube in Puerto Banús (Málaga). Likewise, in the 2018 edition of Art Marbella, Roy Anglada appeared with a single project.
José Miguel Roy Anglada has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including those offered at the Centro Cultural Tomás y Valiente (Fuenlabrada, 2012), the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo (Málaga, 2014 and 2015), Museo de Algeciras (2021), or the Museo del Grabado Español Contemporáneo (Marbella, also in 2021).
In 2017 the Unicaja Foundation of Malaga published an extensive monograph, exceeding 300 pages, entitled Roy Anglada. Memento, which reproduces a hundred and a half pictorial interpretations by Roy Anglada of photographic portraits taken by the painter himself of people around him and fellow artists.
Finally, one of the most prominent painters of his generation, José Manuel Ciria, has written praisingly about Roy Anglada’s work, and thus, in a text published in the catalog of his solo exhibition held in Malaga in 2007, and addressing the artist directly, he stated: “Roy, you are a cynic, you work from irony, that is, you are the only thing you can be today in painting and your attitude is the only one we have left”.
