In the religious art of Aquerreta, the procession goes inside

Academic criticism, which can be disguised as intellectual or circus, depending on the clientele, dispatched years ago the work of Juan José Aquerreta considering it a "regression" and dedicating to his followers other affectionate qualifiers. So the exhibition now dedicated to the painter from Pamplona by the Museum of Navarra can have no interest for artistic progression. And it is a pity, because an exceptional painter like Aquerreta, whose features relate him to other exceptions to the mainstream —I think of Xavier Valls or Cristino de Vera and, today, of Miguel Galano or Elena Goñi—, raises in some areas of his work precisely intellectual questions, that is, conceptual, that make it go beyond the purely artistic plane.

The thematic areas in which the 90 works of the exhibition are distributed correspond to the old typologies of the genres, plus others explicitly reserved for problematic plots, due to their decided religious inspiration, entitled Pain and faith and Resemblance. Aquerreta has chosen to approach the relationship between art and religion in the most difficult and infrequent way: it is a crime against contemporaneity that the subject of painting is faith, unless derision endorses it. In addition, the curatorship of Pedro Luis Lozano Uriz, in tune with the artist, emphatically makes these issues the axis of the project. Two related artists, Diego de Pablos and José Antonio Jiménez, accompany him with their own works.

The artist speaks of religion in the most difficult way: it is almost a crime that the subject of the painting is faith, unless the scorn endorses it.

It was the critic José María Moreno Galván, in an article in the magazine Triunfo, who spoke at the beginning of the seventies of a School in Pamplona, grouping certain painters who, in their eagerness to shake off the informal predominance, acknowledged receipt of pop art. One of them, Pedro Salaberri, still shares traits of that wave with Aquerreta. But it is with his fellow countrywoman Isabel Baquedano with whom the protagonist of the exhibition maintained a greater complicity. Their conversations about Piero or Seurat, in addition to their closeness to Antonio López, helped them to carve out two completely unique artistic territories in which that extravagant inspiration was decisive. But not its forms, but its themes: an even greater extravagance. Baquedano concretized it through a revision of Vuillard, Maurice Denis and other nabis, and Aquerreta does it through much more problematic aesthetic and spiritual invocations. Let's see why.

Of course, in the -slight, immensely delicate- landscapes of Aquerreta there seems a fervor before the beauty of the world that we can very well call religious. And the same in the still lifes or the figures, crossed many by an acute expression of the suffering of the body and soul to which the painter has not been alien. But that's not what it's about. The word spirituality is often abusively summoned by contemporary practices (especially if we tread abstract terrain, as Ángel González García pointed out with his usual wisdom). In that field of the spiritual in art, all cats are brown. The real problem arises when a strictly contemporary painter like Aquerreta becomes a —literal— painter of Byzantine icons. If we think of Tarkovsky's film about Andrei Rublev, the author of the famous Mambre Trinity, we see that, naturally, there are contemporary examples of this preference, we would say of that choice. But it is that, the choice, that causes the problem: the painter of the Odigitria or of a Bulgarian Salvador of the fifteenth century was completely alien to the possibility of an aesthetic choice such as that made by the contemporary painter when he takes them as models. And in this position Aquerreta places its viewers.

'Rear Pavilion of the House of Mercy' (2012). Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Marlborough Gallery

Hannah Arendt said that in Western culture there had been no religious art, but rather art "with a religious theme". A painting proposes, mainly, an aesthetic, sensory approach, although, in reality, many conceptual artists today seem to subscribe to the extra-artistic literalness of the old icon painter. As Romano Guardini said in his classic Letter to an Art Historian, these ancient panels belong to the cult and to the sacred spaces, in which they are presented as irradiations of divinity, and do not intend (as a tintoretto or a rubens intends) to arouse that modern physical commotion that is independent of meanings. So how do you understand what Aquerreta does?

The result naturally squeaks. And it squeaks because this contemporary painter is not given – we think at first – to unfold on the one hand in an artist of modern plastic sensibility (the beautiful parks, orchards and roads of Mutilva, Tudela or Cuatrovientos ...) and in a painter, on the other, of works whose visual patterns are coded to serve their mission as sacred objects. The two senses are incompatible. But it is precisely this play of contexts – we are in an art museum – that subverts the aesthetic order through liturgical objects of great theological density, and that questions us about our current experience.

The exhibition of Aquerreta reveals a taboo, like that of art, truly valid and, for greater scandal, offers us wonderful paintings

On the contrary, of course, it is easier. Operations such as Duchamp's urinal we have come to understand so well that they can no longer subvert any order, they belong to institutionality. From the cult of culture, to quote the famous title of Jacob Taubes, the path is too familiar to us. The transgressions in this field of Maurizio Cattelan or Andrés Serrano end in small scares. In the opposite direction, from the memory of the forbidden, the exhibition of Aquerreta reveals a taboo, like that of art, truly valid and, for greater scandal, offers us wonderful paintings.

'Aquerreta... and likeness. Heian Shodan'. Museum of Navarre. Pamplona. Through September 3.

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