José Antonio Chanivet is, at the present time, one of the artists in the province of Cádiz with the best artistic arguments. He is also one of the artists who has evolved most and best, and one of the painters who has a creative body of work with the greatest pictorial personality and with a potential that is perfectly sustained by seriousness, rigour and artistic sense.
Chanivet is from Puerto Real in Cadiz; an artist linked to the town and to which he has given days of glory. With a training that came from the determining systems of restoration – he studied Fine Arts in Seville, graduating in the branch of Restoration and Conservation – his painting, precisely, has a very well-defined material content, perhaps, coming from that total knowledge of the material and its constituent elements that the concepts of restoration provide. This gives him a plastic dimension that is out of the ordinary, which enables him to face any kind of situation.

To begin by saying that we are in the presence of one of the most secure values of provincial art is no trivial matter and must be confirmed so that no one can be deceived. Firstly, his artistic training. Chanivet starts from a very powerful formal conception. He is technically very well prepared, especially in the handling of materials and in the conformation that emerges from them. This is undoubtedly due to his training, which allows him to have direct knowledge of the plastic elements. But, at the same time, behind this solvent technical capacity, we find a wise, profound artist, with a very particular language, which has been, in all his stages, very well defined and which reveals an artist of great maturity. All this has enabled the painter to achieve an important creative status that has allowed him to be in important exhibitions and his work to form part of first-rate collections. But, in addition, the painting of the Puerto Rican artist makes him participate in a new reality that is imposed from a decisive drawing to structure a figurative field where the real is absolutely nuanced. For all these reasons, it can be argued that José Antonio Chanivet is a very important artist in the environment of the province and that his work is part of the best pictorial imaginary in which one can believe.

His pictorial career has always been backed up by his mastery of drawing, by that elegant line of argument which allowed him to approach any form, however difficult it might be. His work, in all the different moments of his career, has shown a seamless technical development, established so that what was described had formal consistency and opened the perspectives of an artistic concept full of the most suggestive aesthetic approaches.
Now, in a conscious, full and absolute young maturity, José Antonio Chanivet presents in his painting some parreal fields where the representation of the usual is suspended in a new and special illustrative circumstance. In his work, which is based on the very special formulations of this enlightening drawing, the real is distorted in its representative positions. Nothing of what is represented possesses the usual entity to which we are accustomed. There is a decontextualisation, both visually and in its concept. The objects lose their initiatory idea, they share scenarios with other absolutely mediated realities and face a new representative system.

In Chanivet’s work, everything is subordinated to the force of the conforming matter, to this indisputable formal approach that opens up paths for him to walk along with creative solvency, in spaces where painting offers much more than the enigma it manifests. Because in his painting, the real and the fictitious play a different game, not subject to the usual laws of identification. Everything arises because it does; because the artist opens up perspectives to the real so that its established forms cease to be established and establish a new, totally arbitrary dimension. In Chanivet’s works, the concrete, that which the artist so beautifully and strictly shapes from his overwhelming technical quality, adopts new realities; gestures that cannot be embraced with the simple gaze and that enclose new illustrative layers full, in turn, of other realities.