Turner lights up Barcelona | Canary Islands7

Turner lights up Barcelona |  Canary Islands7

A visitor in front of one of Turner's paintings on display at the MNAC show. / ef

The MNAC hosts the exhibition 'La luz es color' with a hundred works, including 26 oil paintings, by the brilliant English landscape artist

Jose Antonio Guerrero

A few years ago the British were asked about their favorite painting. And they pointed out 'The Last Voyage of the Temerario', a work by William Turner (London 1775-1851) before which one can experience what happened to the good old San Virila, who was ecstatic listening to the song of a nightingale and when he came to himself, 300 years had passed. Such is the alchemy that his works give off. That magic of the use of color that Turner raised to the heights is what can be seen until September 11 at the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC), in Barcelona, ​​which has just opened an exhibition to the public with a hundred works from the Tate Britain in London. 'El Temerario' is not there (it is as if they had taken 'Las meninas' to the English museum), but there is a wide representation of Turner's paintings that make 'Light is colour', as the MNAC has titled the exhibition, into a extraordinary exhibition. A tour dotted with the great themes that Turner dealt with in his canvases: ships, seas, country landscapes, atmospheric phenomena and, of course, Venice, which inspired him so much and to which he dedicated 150 watercolours, dozens of oil paintings and more than a thousand pencil drawings.

It is not the first time that Turner has been seen in Spain (he was at the Prado Museum in 2010, and in 2005 at the CaixaFórum in Barcelona), but at the MNAC. Practically absent from Spanish public and private collections, the exhibition therefore offers the opportunity to discover the work of one of the most important British painters, considered to be the master of light and romantic landscape. Visitors will be able to enjoy works such as 'Mouth of the River Humber' (circa 1824), 'Venice Festival' (circa 1845), 'The Ponte delle Torri, Spoleto' (circa 1840) or 'Lake Petworth, sunset' (circa 1827 ) in which Turner makes use of light capable of achieving magical effects in his paintings with an infinite variety of combinations.

the soul of nature

The son of a barber, like Cervantes, Turner became a colossus who painted nature in all its possible forms, sometimes beautiful and serene, other times wild and ferocious. In that eagerness to try to understand her and to capture her soul, as if it were a human being, they say that, already in his sixties, he had himself tied to the mast of a ship while it entered a storm in the open sea to paint 'Storm of snow'. The result was another brutal work about the immense force of nature and that, moreover, reveals Turner's unwavering commitment to art, to seeing, feeling and living what he was going to represent. Few artists like him have captured so much visual poetry on a canvas. One of them, perhaps, is Claudio de Lorena, his teacher, and of whom there are several works, all magnificent, in the Prado.

Through hundreds of paintings, watercolours, drawings and engravings, the MNAC exhibition explores Turner's fascination with nature and atmospheric phenomena, immerses us in the work of the great English landscape painter and reviews his main themes to accompany him on his travels through a Europe whose nature is beginning to be transformed by the Industrial Revolution. There is no 'Reckless' or 'Snowstorm', but it is exciting to be dazzled by the luminosity of 'Light is color'.

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