José Peris Aragó

JOSÉ PERIS ARAGÓ (Alboraya, Valencia, 1907 - 2003).
"Village bell tower".
Oil on canvas adhered to cardboard.
Signed in lower left corner.
Measurements: 34 x 42 cm; 44,50 x 52 cm (frame).
Poster artist and painter. He studied art at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios and at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Carlos de Valencia, where he won several academic awards. He participated in several group exhibitions at the Círculo de Bellas Artes and the Sala Blava d'Acció d'Art. At the age of twenty-five, he held his first solo exhibition at the Ateneo Mercantil in Valencia, a show that was very well received by critics and the public. When the Civil War broke out, he joined the group of plastic artists of the San Gregorio convent in the Ruzafa neighborhood of Valencia, and when his fifth was mobilized, he was assigned to Section II of Instruction and Mobilization in Albaida (Valencia), where he collaborated with the propaganda commissioner. He also made posters commissioned by the Republican Left party, in which he encouraged the defense of Madrid in the rear and the Levante fronts. At the end of the war, he worked in several advertising agencies and made more than five hundred cinema posters for the Valencian film company C.I.F.E.E.S.A.
Around 1950 he began to devote himself fully to painting, his true vocation, where he has accredited a line of rigor and seriousness, in a style somewhere between impressionism and realism.
In 1993 the Board of Directors of the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Valencia awarded him the Gold Medal for Artistic Merit in recognition of a lifetime dedicated to art.