Five characters recall trips that they undertook for the sole purpose of encountering a work of art before which they felt a special emotion. Findings that moved them and produced mixed feelings: from a mystical moment to a very provocative experience.
The most ephemeral and subversive Banksy in Bristol
Juanra Bonet acknowledges that he is not an art expert. Maybe that's why she received her partner's gift in the summer of 2015 with such enthusiasm: two tickets to Dismaland, the satirical and macabre version of Disneyland devised by Banksy in Weston-super-Mare , a placid seaside resort 30 kilometers southwest from Bristol (England), hometown of the mysterious graffiti artist where walking tours are organized to discover the streets through his murals. Opened for just five weeks, "it was advertised as the most disappointing theme park in the world," recalls the presenter of the ¡Boom! And who wants to be a millionaire?Queuing at the entrance, the human landscape was surprised: "you were guys with monocle, top hat little high and, along with others who seemed straight out of a sketch from Little Britain . I really enjoyed that democratization of art. ” He was also shocked that the entrance cost only three pounds, considering that, in addition to Banksy's works, creations by artists such as Damien Hirst , Jenny Holzer and Jimmy Cauty were exhibited . "It was like being immersed in a cartoon by El Roto or Joan Cornellà : all the installations oozed black humor and social criticism," says Bonet.
The attractions in this dystopian fantasy were works of art in themselves. “There was the classic game of steering boats with a steering wheel in an artificial lake, but in this case they were boats loaded with immigrant figures while you dodged drowned corpses. All quite shocking. " Accustomed to the silence of the museums, Bonet says: "That in Bristol was a party, with facilities that made you feel bad, others that made you think and some designed to unleash laughter." As in bumper cars, where one of the vehicles was driven by the Grim Reaper, representing death, while the Bee Gees 'Stayin' Alive played in the background .
The subversive message had its climax in the decadent replica of the iconic Disney castle, at the entrance of which a sculpture of the Little Mermaid distorted by the effect of a rewind of VHS tape surprised . It was inside that he found Banksy's work that most impressed him: the recently injured float of a dying Cinderella , whose body protruded from the mess, surrounded by paparazzi firing their cameras with flash . A direct allusion to the tragic death of Lady Di in Paris. "Banksy reconciled me to art and taught me that it can and should be fun, not just pompous and solemn."
Dark Rothko alongside the Thames
The creative engine of the Madrid artist Coco Dávez , author of the successful series of Faceless faceless portraits , is the constant search for color. When he moved to London in 2010 without knowing anything about the city, "only what he had been able to imagine through cinema and books", he knew that it was a place where red predominated : on buses, in mailboxes, in booths ... And so she certified when she settled in to live in a shared room in a religious residence, something that for a 21-year-old like her, "who came from an atheist family", gave her an extra note of fun. And also in color. One of his first visits was to Tate Modern , the great museum of modern art on the banks of the River Thames. “I went straight to the living room of the Latvian painter Mark Rothko , where I expected to find those brightly colored works . To my surprise, or my disappointment, I stumbled upon an overwhelming place dressed in giant black, gray, and brown paintings that created a strange feeling of suffocation in me, ”he recalls. The also illustrator, whose universe of simple strokes and bright colors is located in the antipodes of Rothko's chromatic torment , suffered a jolt in her mood. “It was the first time that art made me feel something so powerful, I returned home so moved that I began to investigate about those nine works that I had just witnessed. What I found out left me speechless. This drastic turn in his painting was the most stark manifestation of the deep depression that led him to kill himself .
Those phantasmagoric large-format allegories that left their mark on Dávez had been commissioned by the legendary, and now defunct, New York restaurant Four Seasons , which, in addition to being the epicenter of luxury and business power, used to dress its walls with great painters from the 20th century, like Picasso . The gloomy atmosphere of Rothko's pieces caused the author himself to decline the offer and decide to donate them to the London gallery. "Coincidences of life, the ship that was carrying them arrived in London the same day that they announced their suicide, on February 25, 1970," says Dávez, who could only appease his uneasiness with the discovery, months later and also in the Tate Modern, from the expressive imaginary of Joan Miró in a retrospective with paintings, drawings, posters and sculptures of the Catalan genius. It was his way of reconciling with colors, for which he had always been devoted, and shelving the haunting darkness of one of his favorite painters.
Journey into the soul in Rome
Although most of his novels are set in Africa and Central America, the writer Javier Reverte frequently travels to Italy, since he has a special predilection for Renaissance art from the 16th century. "If there is a picture that has moved me to travel in search of her, very often, certainly School of Athens (1510-1512) , of Rafael , exhibited in the Stanze of the Vatican Museums in Rome". Directly commissioned by Pope Julius II to the Urbino artist, the painting is a choral representation of ancient philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians, with Plato and Aristotle presiding over the composition. The fresco occupies one of the walls of the study that housed the pontiff's library, the Estancia de la Signatura, opposite La Disputa del Sacramento , also by Rafael.
“ The school in Athens is not the best painting in the world, but it is a work that encourages reflection. I see in his spirit reflected that great classical and Renaissance aspiration that was to unite aesthetics with ethics. It is a picture of deep moral sense ”. Whenever he visits the Italian capital, Reverte finds a place to explore the sumptuousness of the Apostolic Palace , the official residence of the Popes, and the four rooms decorated with frescoes by the Renaissance genius, "despite the immense queues that form to admire them," resign. "Mine at Stanze di Raffaello is a journey to the soul ."
New York expressionism
The harmony and beauty of nature can be the most genuine expression of art. This was perceived early by Alejandro Vergara Sharp , head of flamenco painting conservation at the Prado Museum. “Road trips with my father sharpened my sensitivity to shapes and textures . When we were children, I encouraged my brothers and me to look at the old elms that lined the road from Ávila to Puerto del Pico , and the texture of the dry stone walls. ” Those journeys by car through the Sierra de Gredos taught him very early that looking is "relating some things to others, creating visual rhymes with little awareness." When he got home, he looked at an art book in the same way that powerfully caught his attention because it contained "a picture of a complex and deep blue" that trapped him until it almost became an obsession. The work was titled A Tree in Naples (1960) and its author was Willem De Kooning , one of the fathers of Abstract Expressionism . A canvas of thick and suggestive brushstrokes inspired by the landscape of southern Italy that connected with those initiation trips with his father on the Castilian plateau.
"Traveling is opening up to different coincidences than usual," says Vergara, who, without turning 20, in the summer of 1980, moved to New York, to deepen her inner conversation with art. New York was then a city in creative effervescence due to the raging beat of graffiti artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat , an avowed admirer of De Kooning's work. And by chance - a friend of her mother's knew the Dutch painter personally - she had the opportunity to visit the artist's studio in East Hampton , a charming town two hours' drive from New York and now a playground for great fortunes. , although at the time it was no more than a fishing village on the shores of the Atlantic where artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko or De Kooning himself began to settle . “I don't remember the exterior of the house, but the workshop was a large space, with huge windows and a white metal and wooden structure. I went up to an elevated walkway that the painter used to contemplate his work from above ”. From there, Vergara was able to observe de Kooning, who was barely speaking , while working on a painting. Scattered around the studio were other paintings of a style that Vergara already knew very well at the time: “His paintings were pure energy and at the same time delicate and wise in their understanding of the beauty of color and paste with which the painting".
Sabrina Amrani, gallery owner
The French gallery owner Sabrina Amrani , based in Madrid and an expert in art from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, did not have much time to think about it. "At Christmas 2017, images from a temporary exhibition of African art in Benin burst onto my social networks ." Enthusiastic comments convinced her to pack their bags in early 2018 and travel to Cotonou , the main city of this former French colony , just before the show closed. She knew the author well, the Malagasy artist Joël Andrianomearisoa , because in her gallery in Carabanchel she had exhibited her works. But in this case the entire production was unpublished, pieces conceived on site and destined to disappear. Amrani was greatly intrigued by one entitled Le poème du bien-aimé (poems of the well-loved, in Spanish).
To get there, he undertook a journey of about 40 kilometers along the coast of the Gulf of Guinea to the city of Ouidah . A route in which he deviated to visit markets, where he heard the stories that hide the wax fabrics of cheerful floral prints so present in dresses and bags in this area of West Africa; visit the royal palaces of red earth of Abomey , world heritage, and discover deserted beaches such as Fidjorossé .
Upon arrival at his destination, an imposing Afro-Brazilian colonial mansion built in the 1920s awaited him . “As I climbed the stairs, a musical thread led me to a room with lattices, through which filtered light filtered , submerged between clay pots of different sizes ”. That suggestive composition was Le poème du bien-aimé . As she got closer, she could distinguish the voice, familiar to her, from the French Jeanne Moreau singing along with the Brazilian singer-songwriter Maria Bethânia the Poem dos olhos da amada by Vinícius de Moraes . "The emotion overflowed me and I ended the visit immersed in a deep silence and with a lump in my throat, thinking about the story that Joël Andrianomearisoa wanted to tell us, that of the shipwrecks on the coasts of Africa". Amrani often recreates herself by evoking that composition, "despite the fact that it has disappeared and that I can only meet her in my memory."
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