The deep crisis that, in all orders, shook Europe since the end of the 19th century, the feeling of dryness and cultural exhaustion, made many artists seek inspiration and Foundation on foreign models, eccentric in the way.
Fruit of this critical situation, already … The beginning of the XX would be happening a series of rupturist proposals, radicals, with greater or lesser programmatic articulation, whose scope and application sought to go beyond the aesthetic. It is what we know as avant -garde. Of these, surrealism is the one that had a higher number of cultors, more geographical expansion and diversity in its manifestations.
Also the one He has left greater grounds in the sociocultural imaginary; Even today we describe as ‘surrealist’ what is incomprehensible, strange or simply illogical.
Surrealism tried to channel and exceed the disorder inclination of surrealists towards the dreamlike, psychoanalysis and, at the methodological level, to the so -called automatism.
A current review
Last year he made a century of the appearance of the first surrealist manifesto, written by André Breton and published together with ‘Poisson Soluble’. Commemorating such ephemeris, this exhibition raises an interesting review of what that movement meant, based on its most relevant aspects and circumstances, so that it offers a fairly adjusted vision of what surrealism meant – taking into account that it is not about An anthological in the strict sense.
Among the criteria that structure the sample, we underline the attention paid to the women’s contest – underground, little or nothing reviewed, usually – and the ‘peripheral’ outbreaks, of which the Spanish cases can be highlighted – beyond Dalí, Miró, Buñuel or Picasso (The absence of José Caballero) – and Spanish -American, which justifies, together with other reasons, the plurality that gives title to the exhibition.
Among the undisputed salaries of surrealism, among its most valuable contributions, the implementation of a series of creative strategies that considerably renewed artistic iconography, whose influence is still possible to warn today. Not so much because all those who have adopted an air, let’s say so, surreal or surrealizing can be labeled as such (Good examples are of this in this exhibition, including successfully), but because he aroused an unprecedented sensitivity towards issues that until that time had only been addressed, if, secondaryly, or through symbolic resources, contained within a more or less conventional rhetoric and that, since then, it has been frankly overflowed. After the opening of this unique Pandora’s box, it seems that no subject or matter should be out of the imagination of the artists.
From top to bottom, ‘Black Darkness 061’ (2008), by Sakiko Nomura; ‘Dog barking to the moon’ (1926), by Miró; and ‘La Aurora’, Paul Delvaux canvas
The absolute liberation advocated by surrealism has found in our days a decisive impulse in new technologies and, very particularly, in AI, around which deep questions of every sign and varied condition are opened. The quality of the selected pieces, their significance and representativeness (There are the canonical names of surrealism, in addition to many others that gave it a letter of nature in different parts of the planet), and the speech that articulates it, makes this sample an extraordinary occasion to know or revisit a capital movement within the history of contemporary art.
It can also be seen now in the Mapfre Foundation An exhibition dedicated to Japanese photographer Sakiko Nomura (1967); It is his first retrospective in Spain, composed of photographs of various series and photolibros, dated from the 1990s to the present. Artist that I have to confess that he had no news and that he has powerfully called my attention. After having soaked with the surreal effusion, It costs to acclimatize to the dense darkness and containment of Nomura. I recommend that an interval be made between exposure and exposure to relax the mood and vision, if you visit that before it, as I did.
At first, the images of this photographer seem that, in general, they should have a more clear definition and greater luminosity, which would have to show us something else. But, as we penetrate his work, we perceive that SE deals with a calculated visual deficit and with a strong emotional load.
The new Mapfre programming in Madrid
‘Other surrealisms’. Collective Commissioner: Diego Star. Four stars.
Sakiko Nomura. ‘Tender is the night’. Commissioner: Enrique Juncosa. Four stars.
Mapfre Foundation. Madrid. Recoletos Paseo, 23. Until May 11
Wraps the bodies and shapes with a genesiac darkness, almost baroque if it were not because its chiaroscuros flee from the strict phenomenal revelation to obtain a minimum environmental temperature, offering us something like A whispered, fleeting, deep and thick; Double intimate. It could be said that Sakiko Nomura does not portray things, or people: what he does is photograph emotions.
#surrealisms #Sakiko #Nomura #Mapfre #Foundation #Penumbras #Subconscious #Darkness #Mantra
