José Luis Samper, Favorite Son of Alcázar de San Juan, has been able to capture through his brushes a La Mancha land almost unknown nowadays.
A Stain with the colorfulness that can only be captured by those who have lived, loved and suffered it. Its streets, traditions, apparently arid and barren fields that are revitalized with the passing of the seasons; rickety mills that until not long ago seemed to have been defeated in another reality by Don Quixote; ancestral traditions that seem to have never existed but have filled hundreds of pages of our most recent history; corners, facades, buildings that have been mutilated, abandoned by the passage of time or brought to their demise by a misunderstood modernity…. all this and much more comes to life through the more than 300 works that can be enjoyed in the museum that bears his name.
“With jubilation, in these times certainly contaminated by splendorous and false triumphalist forms, let us greet the presence of this whole, vocational and pure painter, who does not paint an invented Mancha, because he knows it and feels it better than anyone else”.
TICO MEDINA
Writer and journalist.
“Much has been said and written about José Luis Samper. Perhaps the best definition that can be made of Samper is to say that he is a painter by right, a painter of the living soul, of manifest concerns. A painter, in short.”
MANUEL SAEZ ZAFRA
Journalist at Radio Cadena Española and Radio Nacional de España.
“The way he contemplates reality is, on the one hand, tight, and on the other hand, it implies a wide margin of freedom. This is shown by the way he applies the pigment, in often long brushstrokes, which run sensually and loosely over the canvas.”
JOSE CORREDOR-MATEOS
Poet and Art Critic
“José Luis Samper does not paint the paisanaje because Antonio López Torres, Antonito López García, etc., do not do it either. The manchego what he does is to paint himself in that terse tree, in that imperturbable mutism of a broken street in the siesta, in those skies spilled in the distance of the ocher.”
VALENTIN ARTEAGA
Writer and poet
“For those of us who had regional or territorial news responsibility for Televisión Española for two and a half decades, José Luis Samper was a true source”.
JUAN RODRIGUEZ RUIZ
Former director of territorial programs of TVE
