Its titled Mrs. and it is estimated that it is approximately from 1900. It looks like a mask but it is a face. The image is printed in gelatin silver, one of the noble processes that marked a before and after of modern photography. It is small, barely measuring 13.7×8.5 centimeters, but it fills an entire exhibition. There is not just one, but several in the Mapfre Foundation of Madrid, where Medardo Rosso (1858-1928) takes his discourse on light and his laboratory experiences to the limit with the idea of giving “texture” to photography, bringing it closer to his idea of sculpture. No mean feat for a sculptor trying to rejuvenate a dying medium after an entire century of tedious academic monuments and predictable statues. kitsch.
Although for the purposes of art history books, Rodin has always championed that group of inflexible artists who refused to give in to the pressures of a bourgeois society. The fact that in teaching functions as a headline: its Balzac Monument, that thick column of a body dressed in a coat that deprives it of all traditional expressive attributes, presented in Paris in 1898 with great scandal among critics and a label for the annals: that of the birth of modern sculpture.
Today, that leadership is more than questionable and the curator of this magnificent exhibition, Gloria Moure, undertakes this feat. She does it from the intelligence of focusing on the small nuances, where Rosso was an expert. Also when thinking about this exhibition as a double trip. On the way there there is an extensive study of the context, the work, the value and the intention of this artist determined to record the freedom of sculptural practice.
I am talking about Medardo Rosso's search to illustrate the longing for the changing reality that led him to constant experimentation and from multiple strategies, such as the use of photography, repetition or the conscious use of the material, with which he almost fought, betting by the process above the finish whether wax, bronze or plaster, in a continuum that could have no end.
A dialogue with the material that makes it absolutely contemporary. Here is the way back: how this extensive retrospective also points to the ambition of sculpture today to go beyond the idea of representation, knowing that this limit can never be completely reached and that any form associated with the idea of body, place or material is a constant transit. Sculpture understood as a gesture, as a state of formal and material suspension where research around writing, painting, drawing or experimental music so often converge. I think of Elena Aizkoa, Lucía C. Pino and Julia Spínola, but also of Isa Genzken, Rachel Harrison or Karla Black.
Between that intrinsic round trip of the exhibition: a story yet to be told. Imagine that Paris at the end of the 19th century where painting took over almost everything and where sculpture, little or poorly displayed, fled from statuary under a total break with tradition. Two artists becoming friends in 1893. Rodin at 53 and Rosso at 35. Meanwhile, Baudelaire writing The flowers of Evil, the Lumière brothers presenting Le Repas as a baby, the first public cinematographic spectacle, at the same time that the first edition of the Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte, later known as the Biennale di Venezia, was held in Venice. And a Picasso coming of age in Barcelona on the verge of reaching that Parisian “everything is bustling,” which became the artistic epicenter of the world. A great desire to change everything and an unparalleled intensity that ended up deteriorating the friendship between Rodin and Rosso. They say that both had a strong character, although it was the lucky one Balzac The first one was at fault. French critics were quick to comment on Rosso's possible influences on Rodin, something that Rodin would never admit and that Rosso would never forgive.
Faithful to his freedom of spirit, Medardo Rosso focused on other things, defending his ideas at all costs, as great maxims, meticulously and under an overwhelming cult of perceptive precision. For example, the idea that “you can't turn around” a sculpture. Hence the precise assembly of the exhibition and the importance of photography, with which he began this text. A fixed image that the artist saw as an abstract and two-dimensional mode of perception that counteracted the static character of traditional sculpture. The one that the theorists of the moment called a “paperweight.”
For Rosso, sculpture was very far from that. Art is an indivisible unit: an atmosphere that surrounds a figure, the color that animates it, the perspective that puts it in its place. The artist demonstrated that light has the power to dematerialize sculpture and that a work of art is not a solid object surrounded by emptiness. An awareness of space versus limited things that, above all, he said, should make you think. “He who does not speak says nothing,” he once wrote.
He couldn't have been more clairvoyant. Because what he strove to say, more or less directly, is that beyond what we see, what matters is trusting the visual truth of the things that our eyes find and in all the sensitive echoes that the work awakens. in our memory and in our conscience. I reiterate that key word that Rosso throws between the lines: trust. Hence the meaning of his best-known phrase: “He who sees widely, thinks widely.” An ode to the gesture. Or that “nothing is material in space, because everything is space and, therefore, everything is relative.” Is there a nicer way to say that everything is emotion?
'Medardo Rosso. Pioneer of modern sculpture'. Mapfre Foundation. Madrid. Until January 7th.
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