Night after night for a whole week in May, a grove of rusco and hydrangeas grew on Goya's door of the Prado Museum, curling into its columns and bulging the wall at the back of the portico. At dawn on the last day the enchantment had been realized: the neoclassical architecture of Juan de Villanueva in that part of the building now presented a voluptuously baroque aspect. "Imagine how happy we are: it is the first time that the Prado does something like this and asks a contemporary design studio for an artistic intervention of this type," explains Pablo López Navarro, co-founder and director of Casa Josephine, the design studio that has created this installation with the help of Sara Uriarte. of the floral art studio Cordero Atelier.
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"As the three exhibitions that are now in the Prado are about baroque art, it occurred to us to transform Goya's high door into another inspired by those of that period," López continues. "It is an ephemeral architecture, like the arches that were built in cities during the Baroque to celebrate triumphs and historical events." "From the beginning I realized that we had two important challenges on the table," explains Uriarte. "One was structural and one was aesthetic. Both are important because the installation had to remain much longer than usual for a floral intervention, the heritage had to be preserved with a totally self-supporting system that does not damage the building and also had to be beautiful and very baroque, but expressed in a contemporary language. "
The columns of the Goya Gate of the Prado Museum, surrounded by rings of vegetation. Yago Castromil
One of the niches of the Goya door of the Prado Museum surrounded by vegetation. Yago Castromil
Inaugurated on May 19 coinciding with International Museum Day, the Baroque Door celebrates in this case the friendship between the Prado and a type of creation, the contemporary, that the museum had welcomed in its rooms in the past (for example the exhibition of Cy Twombly in 2008) but with which, according to López Navarro, he had not collaborated at this level until now. To build it, 25,000 hydrangeas and 50,000 gold-painted rusco stems were needed, first assembled in the studio of Cordero Atelier. Then, during six nights of work, this structure was installed that reveals an investigation of the Prado funds.
"From the Baroque we took the brilliant images, the horror vacui, the accumulation, the overexposure and the language taken to the extreme," says Uriarte. "We look for spectacularity, gimmick and emotionality. We were not interested in rest, but in tension, dynamism and movement."
Detail of the process of creation of the Baroque Door of Casa Josephine and Cordero Atelier installed in May in the Prado Museum.Yago Castromil
Detail of the process of creation of the Baroque Door of Casa Josephine and Cordero Atelier installed in May in the Prado Museum.Yago Castromil
López adds that "in addition to Baroque architecture [the rusco rings of the columns evoke the turns of those of Solomonic style] we were inspired by the paintings of Herrera el Mozo that can be seen right now in the museum in one of the temporary exhibitions. The mass of hydrangeas has the colors and amorphousness of those explosions of clouds that can be seen in the background in his paintings." "Another aspect that we took into account to design the protuberances of the plant mass is the incidence of light on it," concludes Uriarte, "how it sneaks through its nooks and crannies and illuminates the niche or how it casts shadows that increase the mystery and chiaroscuro and makes the installation seem to have exploded outside the vase. All to enhance the dramatic and theatrical character of the intervention". It will disappear next month, but it will last in the photos.
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