I was born in Madrid in 1936, on the side of the losers of the Spanish civil war.
My childhood: a neighborhood on the border of Madrid’s red suburbs. I drew a lot, like all children. Maybe a little more.
My adolescence: I dreamed of studying, but we did not have the means and we had to earn a living. My refuge: read. Preferably poetry.
After having worked with the written word, the theater and even the music, I mainly work with the plastic arts; for over forty years: drawing, painting, engraving, photography …
In my first period of painting, canvas and paper absorbed a lot of my demons. Subsequently, slowly, my work shifted towards a rather poetic universe: everyday or magical, abstract or figurative, vague or precise … with, more and more, the awareness of being only a witness, of myself and of what I observe.
I left Spain in 1967 to settle in France. I lived in four or five different cities. For five years, I have been in a big city in the Southwest.
Tomorrow … How do I know? Tomorrow has not yet arrived.
More and more, in my work, it is the images themselves that guide me. I discovered that images, at times, are smarter than the person making them.
In Léon Diaz Ronda’s paintings, there is a poetic universe made up of delicate mists and melancholy, or even somewhat mysterious, gaps in the light. But beyond the immediate representation, what fascinates above all is the implicit message of these works inspired by a transcendence. It is a humanism of a universal character and can even be mystical. Léon Diaz Ronda is a sage, painter and philosopher at the same time.
Colette Clavreul, gallery owner. (2013)
