Sevilla discovers the most contemporary Murillo | Culture
The more traditional Murillo may have unsuspected connections with contemporaneity. The ecstasy of the Immaculate find a game of mirrors in the counterculture and the roguish children of baroque Seville unexpectedly anticipate objective realism and social photography. To look at Murillo in a different way, to deconstruct him, to raise the costumes of his characters to discover that there, crouching, awaits the metaphor of modernity. It is the proposal of the unusual exhibition Murillo application. Materialism, Charitas, Populism, organized by the Institute of Culture and Arts of the City of Seville, and which is the epilogue of the celebrations in commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Baroque painter.
While in the Museum of Fine Arts in Seville you can see an anthology that shows from his religious work to gender painting, Murillo application It extends until March 3 in different venues of the city with a radically different proposal to take the artist to the very epicenter of the avant-garde. But is it possible that the baroque painter who symbolizes religion and kind art is also a reference for contemporary radical rupture? "This exhibition is a great toolbox to contemplate Murillo in another way. He tries to interpret his work with great risk and try to remove the dandruff and the kilos of academia that often overshadow him. What we intend is to attack the prejudices around his figure, "says Pedro G. Romero, one of the curators of the exhibition together with Luis Martínez Montiel and Joaquín Vázquez.
Five locations
With works by Picasso, Man Ray, Duchamp, Godard, Joseph Beuys, David Hockney or Tarsila do Amaral, among many others, Murillo application It is an invitation to the viewer to look radically and new at the artist. Five venues articulate a sample of narrative conception that analyzes, connects and throws bridges between the past and the present.
In the Santa Clara Cultural Center, a renovated building that was a sixteenth-century convent, the first reading is based on the reflection on the materialist. The exhibition continues in Sala Atín Aya, where the concept of charitas and in the CICUS (Center for Cultural Initiatives of the University of Seville), which is also part of an old monastery, the curators propose a rethinking of populism in his work. The other two venues are the Hospital de los Venerables and the Hospital de la Caridad where Murillo painted a good part of his work and which preserve the air of baroque Seville intact.
Modernity rejected who was considered the most important artist in Spain
Pedro G. Moreno
"Modernity rejected who was considered the most important artist in Spain. Murillo is rejected when the avant-garde arrives that paradoxically coincides with the rescue and glory of another three of the Golden Age: Velázquez, Valdés Leal and Zurbarán. Murillo disappears and ceases to be a reference. However, in the technical reproduction it has a popular fame and appears in almanacs, tobacco vitolas, stamps and labels. Murillo becomes the painter of quince meat, "adds G. Romero in reference to the multiplication of the imaginary Murillo in the iconography of popular devotions.
But popular devotion, sacred prints and mysticism kitsch they suddenly acquire a heterodox root. He is the painter who is profiled in this unique exhibition that redefines the foundations of the murillesque. The spectator attends a curious set of influences where Duchamp's work connects with Murillo. Surprisingly, the famous Carrying Pepe Espaliú - the action he took in 1992 when he fell ill with AIDS and was transported from the Congress of Deputies to the Reina Sofía Museum - seems a contemporary projection of one of the canvases of the Baroque artist: Saint John of God with a sick person. This painting is in the Hospital de la Caridad, where that action of Espaliú is now evoked, together with the palanquin of Miguel Mañara, the founder of the hospital that commissioned Murillo the series dedicated to the works of mercy and that created this charitable institution of care of the dying in the seventeenth century.
In the different venues there is a renewing reading of the Murillo aesthetic. The exhibition becomes a building whose corridors intersect Murillo with Robert Morris, Julio Romero de Torres or Ilya Kabakov. The Baroque artist inspires Rococo minimalism, vaporous abstraction, painting that is feminized, conceptual mysticism or performances of the cares. "Many of the visual art practices of our time have, whether they know it or not, a direct relationship with Murillo's ways of doing things," explains G. Romero.
The modern rogues of the 'Rockokó'
CICUS headquarters shows the connection of the Holy Childhood painted by Murillo with angels without history that today levitate on the mud of modernity. This is how the relationship of murillian children with a fanzine like Rocko, a classic of the juvenile aesthetics of the 20th century made by the artist Miguel Trillo. Misguided teenagers run between young angels and children of shacks with baroque rogues. "It is an aesthetic impulse in which Miguel Trillo acts as a mirror of that panda of misguided children. There is some syndrome Peter Pan, but the story of James Barrie drinks from the rogues of Charles Dickens, from the pre-Raphaelite angels and devils, from the urchins of Hogarth, from the children of Gainsborough, from the childhood representations of Rococo painting, "Pedro explains. G. Romero as a murilean genealogy.
