‘Secret Museum’, by Jesús Munárriz: eroticism in street suit

Here are our fantasies and our desiresthe stories that we recall again and again because they are not so much art stories and our own personal stories.

Happily rescued now from a distant edition carried out by the Monte Ávila publishing house, which did not even have distribution in Spain, Expanded and enlightened with drawings by Paco MontañésMunárriz displays ingenuity, humor and writing that does not stop making mythology or art a form of pop update. His concise style, his sharpness when showing stories, of treating them, its sentimental distancingtheir way of using parody makes each of these portraits be shown as something close, as something alive.

It was not an easy task to remove the topic that wraps them, say something really novel of Led Chiquita Piconera de Romero de Torres He looks how only she knows how to look. Munárriz It takes away the frames of all these women, to the golfillos of Caravaggio, To a San Antonio claimed by temptations and makes them those beings of flesh and blood that leave the canvases of the solemn and go down to the sidewalks, to the beds of our biographies, to be confused with our passions and our unconfessable secrets.

They are a handful of mischievous, provocative, intimate lives that want to stop time through eroticism, the beauty of their bodies, surprised in what they have eternal: That breast or that pubis, those positions or that call of the flesh.

“How can I paint you?” He wonders in that beautiful poem entitled ‘The artist’s doubts’ and that question will cross the whole book. A question that, in reality, investigates What is in the gaze of the one who contemplates And it paints any of these bodies, what dimension that framework of astonishment, obscenity or pleasure has.

With carelessness, with irony, Munáriz approaches not only some of those Creators’ intimacieswith so many angles, but it gives voice to all those women who offered their bodies to art, points out the abysses between the artist and the model in that exercise for which eternity tried to retain, express a world within this world with all its obsessions and all their happy wounds.

In ‘Secret Museum’ we find, in short, a munáriz in true state of grace. He, who is many poets, finds one of the best. The book is a enjoyment (never better) from beginning to end. A major book, as seductive as it is endearing. A great book that poetry readers cannot get lost. You will see.