Miguel Sevillano has built his own 'Capilla del Arte' to paint his own tribute to the Sistine Chapel, a project in Olvera (Cádiz) that he has carried out with his own means and has taken him ten years.
When the artist Miguel Sevillano (Olvera, 1971) is asked what has led him to build and paint a neoclassical chapel in the middle of an olive grove in the Sierra de Cádiz, he answers resolutely: "I have broken the time line." The phrase - echo by - resounds grandiloquent under the ten meter high vault in which up to 400 characters float painted on an intense sky. Sevillano has dedicated the last ten years of his life, a good part of his savings and his health to this anachronistic task with one wish: "All I want is for whoever enters to experience beauty."
The
Chapel of Art
- as its owner has called it - rivals in size and height with the Sanctuary of the Virgen de los Remedios, an 18th century Baroque temple built on the border between the municipal boundaries of the small towns of Olvera and Torre -Alhaquime. There, in an olive grove that belonged to his grandfather, Sevillano set out in 2009 to build a neoclassical monument decorated with neo-baroque paintings that would serve as an art gallery to display his collection and as a work studio. The artist commissioned the architect Eduardo Francou to construct a 250-square-meter building, covered by a barrel vault with a maximum height of ten meters with nods to “the sacristy of the Cathedral of Toledo, that of Granada and the Sistine Chapel itself. ”, As the Olvereño sums up.
In addition to its size —the Chapel of Art is 20 meters long by seven meters wide, just half the size of the Sistine—, the homage to the chapel painted by Michelangelo is evident in the particular interpretation of the Last Judgment, in this case painted on the vault with acrylics. From eight circles emerge up to 400 characters with strong features reminiscent of Luis Ortega Bru's sculpture (San Roque, Cádiz, 1916-Seville, 1982) and similarities that do not go unnoticed by the locals. "There a neighboring olive farmer is painted, here a waitress from the town and further afield the masons who helped me build this," says Sevillano, who has spent five years painting the entire set.
Although the Olvera chapel is presided over by the canvas of a Nazarene dressed in purple that recalls the
Expolio
del Greco of the Toledo Cathedral, it is not a place of worship. "This in another time would be heresy," jokes the painter. The cover, carved by stonemason Francisco Valcárcel, pays tribute to the arts. Inside, a collection of 84 paintings on mythological themes, landscapes, portraits, still lifes and religious paintings line the walls of the monument, in the purest style of nineteenth-century museums. These are the works that Sevillano kept from series that he has painted throughout his career and to which he had been wanting for years to dedicate a space in which to exhibit them.
After spending a figure of "at least five zeros" that he does not want to reveal and having suffered back pain that he does not know if they will heal from painting the vaults, Miguel Sevillano plans to open his chapel to curious visits. He is already finalizing the permits to make it possible and he hopes that in the summer all the procedures are overcome. The expectation among its neighbors is maximum: the municipalities of Olvera and Torre-Alháquime and even the Diputación de Cádiz have already shown their interest in incorporating the monument into tourist routes. This is good for the artist, after dedicating ten years of his life to consummate his dream in a secluded place in the Sierra de Cádiz. “The game was breaking stereotypes, why do you have to go to a big city to find a palace or a great monument? Now there is one here, in the middle of the field ”,The painter ditch proudly, reconverted to a kind of Renaissance man of the XXI century.
