Originally, Paco Salas was one of many other children whose talent for drawing aroused their teachers’ admiration. The leads of life, cold and sometimes almost deterministic, unfortunately cause many of these talents to come to nothing.

This, however, wasn’t to be Paco Salas’s fate. After having gained a reputation as a woodcarver - a maker of religious images – in the Lepanto street which is situated only a few meters away from the Franciscan parish church, he moved to Catalonia where he started working in the furniture industry making business which ten years ago finally enabled him to dive into the world of exhibitions head first. He started with painting exhibitions, later on doing exhibitions on wood-carved religious images at the same time. Over the years he became regarded as one of Spain’s true experts for medieval sculpturing.

A peculiar feeling for painting

Salas first steps as a painter are marked by determination and overflowing enthusiasm. By now as many as almost 40 individual samples are proof of his creativity and show traces of a great self-taught painter. Accepting the fact to express himself on canvas with sincerity and emotion, many of his paintings are filled with nostalgic memories of “his” – our – Almería.

His paintings of staging Bulls are the ones that really show his vibrant and peculiar painting style, causing people to burst out in impressed “ahs”. In these paintings Salas manages to capture the solemn and harsh spirit of bullfighting mythology, a picturesque image of our national fiesta, so contrary to the pictorial way it is shown on some “posters”.
Salas’s extensive bullfighting series depict the protagonists of the fiesta with great psychological insight – in an eternal sunlight and shadow, which Eros and Thanatos have risen from – making these paintings highly appreciated by gallery owners on both sides of the Atlantic. An Impression which brings forward the mythical recreation of “eternal Spaniards”, timeless and merimeesco, and which is brilliantly corroborate by the series dedicated to the "majos" and "majas" - handsome men and good-looking women - set off in chiaroscuro, in some portraits of bandits and especially in the beach scenes or the grape harvest where he universalizes – developing them from the Indalian painting style – the landscape of Almeria.

These samples make Paco Salas form part of the group of painters from Almeria, which have chosen plastic arts as their form of expression and by this reaching the international markets with a solid and universalized version of our region.

Diego Cara