Chords and dissonances. Melodies that intersect or differ. The exhibition opened this Friday on The city hall of Cordoba, the first of two major exhibitions celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Julio Romero de Torres.
A kind of modern and transgressive symphony, because of modernity and the rupture of an image as rooted as it is not very accurate, is the exhibition entitled “Romero de Torres, painter of modernity”. Dialogue with the Telephone collection‘.
The meeting opened in the museum that bears the painter’s name with the idea of being not only a dialogue, as had been proposed, but also “a picture game” between the way the Cordovan painter had represented certain themes and the way contemporary art or art after him has captured them, according to the works selected in the Telefónica collection. With or without relationship, with a more obvious or more difficult analogy. This is how he explained it Oscar Fernandezits curator with Laura Ramón.
For example, it has always been said that ‘Grace’ It was a profane Pietà, because of the way the nuns held the defeated body of the naked young woman. And it is precisely this composition that he finds himself confronted with, but in the language of contemporary art, from the point of view of the contemporary artist. Marina Abramovic.
It’s a photographbut of a moment, that of a performance that the author carried out with his partner at the time, the artist Ulay, who also speaks of the way in which the references of the exhibition were sought.
As the mayor said, Jose Maria BellidoAt the inauguration, it is an opportunity to see the “Romero de Tores plus” avant-garde and transgressive”, that is to say, understanding that his painting, beyond the folklorism and the clichés that hide it, was the most avant-garde of his time.
The works are treated as images in which Romero de Torres’ vision contrasts with that of other authors.
And for this, there is nothing better than to surround him with the necessary company, which are the transgressors and the vanguards of other times. Of him and of those who followed, until the 21st century.
The Julio Romero de Torres Museum has adapted for the occasion by moving some works to connect them with those arriving from the Telefónica Foundation. Receiving the visitor “Death of Saint Agnes”a very landscaped work (152 x 258 centimeters) in which the corpse of the protagonist is seen in profile. The exhibition organizers play here with the self-portrait of John Coplansa multi-part work showing a recumbent figure. Also on this scale is Sam Taylor-Wood’s “Soliloquy I”, also about a lying man.
Hispanic Modernity
The curators wanted above all to confront the work of Romero de Torres with avant-garde authors, because Romero de Torres was also one, and this is one of the axes that gives meaning to the exhibition: to strip the artist’s work of the author’s clichés. ‘Rivalry’.
“From there is born a Hispanic modernity as contradictory as it is fascinating, because the noble and the popular converge, and innovative gestures are deployed between eclectic forms, historicism and echoes of the classical world,” say the curators. This is how, for example, the work of Romero de Torres is brought into conflict with rigorous contemporary Cubism.
From 1917 onwards, it is ‘Joys‘, a work that recreates the essence of this flamenco style with the three elements of flamenco art. Dance, song and guitar. Four years later, Albert Gleizes signs “Composition à la guitarre”, a deconstruction of the six-string instrument playing with colors.
“The Death of Saint Agnes”, accompanied by the self-portrait “Lying Figure”, by John Coplans
Juan Gris is also a cubist, perhaps the main Spaniard who cultivated this style after Picasso, and in the case of this work it is a three-way dialogue. The canvas proposed by Romero de Torres is again flamenco: ‘La copla’, made in 1927 and showing a full-length woman with a shawl and a guitar half hidden from the viewer. A year earlier, the work of Juan Gris, entitled ‘La Chanteuse’.
She is a singer, as her name suggests in French, dressed in red and different from Romero de Torres, but also very feminine. Complete the conversation with three ‘Seduzir’, a photograph of Helen Almeida in which the play of a woman’s skirt and legs also shows how the author and the painter looked not so different.
A sitting woman It is a common theme in art, but August Herbin does it in “Portrait of Madame H” with equally cubist connotations and Julio Romero de Torres in “Portrait of a Young Man” does it again, in 1902, in search of his most personal style.
If “Grace” is a secular Pietà, it is confronted with a work of the same theme from a performance by Marina Abramovic
“Angeles y Fuensanta”, from 1909, is associated with “Open balcony and fish plate”, a canvas by Manuel Ángeles Ortiz in which the vast landscape is recreated through a window, as is the case in that of Julio Romero de Torres. From there, the confrontation between the works of Romero de Torres ends with most current pieces.
“Trini’s Granddaughter” is a classic nude, depicting a woman lying on a sofa and looking directly at the viewer. It is common in the history of art and is confronted with two. The first, ‘Woman lying reading’, by Javier Vilato in 1964, a work in which the forms appear deconstructed, but in which what she wants to show in the title is intuitive. Much more clearly in the photograph “Innocence and Youth”, by Ouka Lele, with a woman who does not appear completely naked.
Close-up portraits are common in Romero de Torres’ work and here four are proposed, all female, which are confronted with the photographs of Salla Tykkä, and which evoke in a way, according to the organizers of the exhibition, the striking video clip of ‘Thriller’of Michael Jackson.
It sums up the spirit of an exhibition that stages the image and what is in front of the painter, because the close-up portrait can be achieved in as many ways as there are creators.
The feminine is always present with “Conchita Triana!”, a full-length portrait of a woman, with a long landscape in the background through the window. The work proposed here is ‘The Call’, which he interpreted Paul Delvaux in 1944 and in which the protagonist also has a very striking journey around her, although of an urban nature.
The last of the correlations opposes Cordoba to New York. Julio Romero de Torres proposed on the web “On the river” a woman naked from the waist up, but with her back turned, looking at the landscape of the Guadalquivir and the sleeping city which was barely perceived as a suggested silhouette.
Paul Graham signs ‘Woman with Golden Face, New York 2000’, a woman in the same position with the landscape of cars, showcases and shops in a dimly lit area.
At the opening of the exhibition, the director of the Telefónica Foundation, Luis Prendespraised Romero de Torres’ “combination of light and shadow” and praised the concept of the exhibition. “I am sure that tonight, when the museum closes, the works here will begin to speak.”
The mayor insisted that this exhibition means “updating the vision of Romero de Torres and reconquering the validity and avant-garde from within.” Innovation is the driving force behind the nomination, which will cleanse the work of the author of Romero of all the adhesions and will ensure that its values are disseminated.
