The MuVIM offers from today and until the next 17 of May a journey through the passages of the work of Ludovico Ariosto, Furious Orlando. Like this, through the brush of Adrián Alva, the Upper Room of the Provincial Museum proposes a journey where universal literature and local history merge in a careful visual interpretation of this text that had a profound impact on Renaissance literature and Western culture. The new proposal, made up of a selection of ten illustrations by the artist, offer a meditation on honor, the desire and identity that will show us the streets of a city that was the nerve center of the Mediterranean. Alva's work also embodies the transformation of Orlando, the noble knight who loses his reason for the love of Angélica, and the stories of female warriors like Bradamante, as well as some myths.
Adrián Alva is part of an illustrative tradition that understands the use of past historical styles not as an anachronistic error, but as a critical method. In his artistic interpretation of Canto XXVIII of Furious Orlando, iconographic erudition is transformed into a sophisticated device where modernism, Viennese secession and Japanese print are not mere quotations of style, but the deep grammar from which he rewrites this episode historically little or not at all illustrated in the past. In his approach there is the same desire to turn the surface into a field of decorative forces, where the line, the pattern and rhythm of the motifs have as much narrative weight as the action represented. It should be noted that the Japanese print works here as a third pillar, not only because of the flat representation or the taste for the cropped silhouette, but because of the idea that each element of the painting – an animal, a plant, an apparently marginal object – brings an autonomous poetic charge. And as a result, each image can be read both as a whole and in detail.
