The poet and classical philologist Charo Guarino likes the hands of Lidó Rico (Yecla, 1968), which she says are both “instrument and artistic object”, and that the artist himself tirelessly molds in wax and turns into elements. key to his sculptures and installations. Regarding her new exhibition, ‘Dádiva. La memoria perforada’, which this Friday opened at the Roman Museum-Theater of Cartagena, where it can be enjoyed until April 2024, Guarino exclaims: “It impacts the viewer and provokes reflection by appealing to the emotions that its contemplation awakens.” Pure Lidó Rico: extreme in the thoroughness of his work, inexhaustible in his faith in art as a sacred space. Creator of a particular universe that is shaped by sculptures, paintings, videos and installations, he argues that I wish “the spell of a light touch” were capable of freeing us.
‘Dádiva’ “is the result of conscientious research and artistic work inspired by the history of Roman antiquity as an engine of creation, establishing a dialogue between past and present in the display of round-trip paths, from ancient art to of our days,” explains the curator of the exhibition, Miriam Huéscar, who already curated ‘Amotinados’ in Murcia, the work of the Yeclano that could be seen at the Cárcel Vieja Cultural Center. She assures that “this exhibition proposal makes us think about the past as a contemporary creation, making us remember that the foundation of what we are and what we create is in the history of those who lived before us.”
Revelation
“The enigmatic frieze that is presented in ‘Dádiva'”, the central core of the exhibition and “made up of no less than 252 unique pieces inspired by Roman iconography, is a set that intensifies and expands the contents that the museum guards, revealing to us the history, memory and art that survive preserved in this space, now offered as a gift by the artist,” says Huéscar.
The artist trusts that the public will dialogue with his “fragments of time encapsulated in a gesture”
In the curator’s opinion, “this ocean of hands that gravitates formulating the thaumaturgic frieze installed in line with the museum, aims to turn the visitor into an archaeologist capable of discovering, in its infinite resources, hundreds of stories from a past linked to culture.” Roman, to the mining, to the place and to important Roman figures such as Lucius and Gaius Caesar, to whom his grandfather Augustus dedicated the construction of the Roman Theater of Cartagena.
“These two brothers,” he recalls, were children of Julia the Elder and Marcus Vipsanio Agrippa, patronus of Carthago Nova, making clear the special importance of the city in the imperial global vision as one of its strategic locations for its territorial and cultural expansion. . “Our two protagonists,” he points out, “became the emperor’s favorite grandchildren because, from a young age, he saw in them his potential successors.” But, “unfortunately, fatal and merciless fate wanted both of them to die in their early adulthood, causing a wound in the emperor that made him want to perpetuate what the future took from him, through the insertion of their names on different buildings that “They were built in his honor by the vast Roman Empire.”
Nothing new under the sun
In fact, “the tribute in memory of those two late young men is shown in the port city with a legacy in the form of a theater, whose two access doors, on which the lintels dedicated to Caio Caesar and Lucius Caesar were installed, give paladin testimony in our present of an unconditional attachment that has survived the inexorable passage of time.
And more than two thousand years later, Guarino explains, Lidó Rico “establishes a formal and content dialogue with Antiquity, revealing one more link in the long chain that unites us with the Romans and which demonstrates that even in the most avant-garde creation there is no Nothing new under the sun”. Lidó Rico, who has scrutinized every corner of the Roman Theater in detail, built with materials such as limestone, marble and sandstone from the surrounding quarries, as well as white panthelic marble from Greece, speaks of “archaeology grafted between episodes of commotion, light and surprise”, and trusts that the visiting public will dialogue with their “fragments of time encapsulated in a gesture.”
The inauguration this Friday of the Lidó Rico exhibition was chaired by the Minister of Culture, Carmen Conesa, and was also attended by the mayors of La Unión, Joaquín Zapata; and from Mazarrón, Ginés Campillo. She received them Elena Ruiz Valderas, director of the Roman Museum-Theater.
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