No religious painting was painted to exhibit it in a museum. On the contrary, no work of art, even inserted in the spaces of worship, has a role itself, or liturgical. The icons do it. In Russia, after the revolution, elderly women kneel to pray in front of them, although these objects had already admitted to the museums as an offer to the new divinity: the people. But here’s the difference. Hannah Arendt He wrote that in the West there was, in rigor, religious art, but the art of the religious theme, even whatever the context of the experience.
However, modern and contemporary art, despite the roots in the autonomy of aesthetics, was always attempted, on the contrary, by the confusion of these borders, to date. In fact, art as a new religion was often an explicit postulate. In one of his memorable statements, Ángel González García said that artistic abstraction is allegedly spirituality, a bit like the value of the army. From Malevich, Mondrian and Kandinsky, “The Spiritual”, “The Sacred” or even “The Mystic” are invocations appreciated by the artists and their artists. They feel on their ground, so to speak. Paul Claudelwhose poetry was not an artistic alternative to religious dogma, but was supported by Rimbaud as “wild mystical”. Therefore, wild mystical – without dogma, without doctrinal transmission, without writing – was, in the best cases, a propensity for art and modern culture. Something similar to texts without texts, even if not always illiterate. Once empty of specific meaning, all cats – the great apotic signs of the absolute spiritual (night, light, nothing, etc.) – are black. There have also been other approach, of course, to spirituality or religion, from the course of Bill Viola to the fears hepatantAlthough all with the current in favor, of the León Ferrari or Maurizio Cattelan type.
The exhibition Zurbarán (on) NaturalAt the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC), it is a admirable exception to “abusive transversality or leisure”, as the director of the museum, Pepe Serra, calls so many contemporary spiritualities. The central nuclei are the three replicated paintings, from the museums of Lyon, Boston and Barcelona, which Zurbarán dedicated to the vision of Pope Nicolau from front of the body – a little more than incorrect: practically alive or reserved – of Sant Francesc. He moved to the Basilica of Assisi, in the mid -twelfth century, but the legend was running from the very death of the poorto which the Franciscans presented as a Old Christ. The Pope and his entourage were ecstatic in front of the standing body, open eyes, face anjing, bloody stigmas, all evidence of Christian similarity. But the genius of Zurbarán has nothing to do with the beatified mercy of the scene, not even with faith. It is specifically artistic and refers to the structure of the image, to the assembly, so to speak, in which it explains its disturbing effects. Zurbarán does not offer us, like Murill A The dream of the patrician (or the many illustrations of the Franciscan legend, some present here), the representation of the scene of that vision, but the vision itself. In this theater, let’s see what the Pope saw. St. Francis is the only figure: a body resurrected in the darkness of a niche, accompanied only by its shadow: the unequivocal indication, as Victor Stoichita would have said, of his existing presence.
Among the many other virtues, the exhibition offers an aesthetic experience under the pressure of this “other” experience in which the image opens up to an inconclusive mystery. We are in a museum, the three paintings are together (which is unthinkable elsewhere and any more time). Are accompanied or in front of the phenomenal Big grass fabric for a document (1964), by Tàpies, one of the contemporaries characterized spiritualistic (without texts, only music). Against the propensity to things taken from the hair of the other exhibitions on the subject, the rest of the contemporary connections with the Francescs From Zurbarán they are equally taxed and almost literal: the black and white radical of Gorinovart, Tony Catany’s shopping nature, the golden fabric of Aurèlia Muñoz, the ghostly projection on the wall of Eulalia Vallldosira.
In March 1966, a very remembered fact was remembered in Barcelona. Many intellectuals, artists, journalists, etc. The police surrounded them, after a couple of days they made them out and fined them; The friars nourish them, many priests manifested themselves in their defense, a little picturesque, but with historical effects. One of the friars was Antoni Llena, very young at the time. There he met Tàpies and Ràfols, and there he decided to leave his order to enter another, that of the artists. But he ended up transporting thePoor art At a certain point, in fact, poverty, to its nullity and sumptuous inheritance. His contribution here is a collection of drawings – or graphic tracks – expressly outlined for the exhibition, such as the Valldosera piece.
From the Avant -Garde, the invocation Zurbaranesca It was constant: Juan Gris, the Vallecans, El Paso, Cristino de Vera … The schematic synthesis, the geometry, the iconic power of habits and launchers, made it irresistible. But this is not a historiographic exhibition (it has already been). It is an exhibition delimited to the nearby and particularly eloquent readings of the illuminating ease of a fundamentally syntactic and semantic purpose. Who in his origins was a “pictures of images”, attentive to the touch of volumes, did not think of the content of faith, but the transcendental joint of the imaginary vision. It is Zurbarán who, in fact, puts us in front of the mechanics of our experience. This is an immersive experience.
