CARME CENTER. Museum, 2
The call trajectories of the Center del Carme was conceived to give visibility and relevance to the work of Valencian artists or residents of the Valencian Community. Last summer we saw the very interesting work of Teresa Cebrián and now it's Xisco's turn Mensua (resident a Rocafort), which rejects the term "retrospective" and opts for "reading". 15.600 dies presents sober works but with a sense of humor made from the artist's adolescence until two days ago, starting with a large showcase that contains the most intimate, the notebooks and notepads that Mensua a filled of drawings for almost forty years and which already indicate some of his recurring themes: the childhood, the time, memory or design. In the next room, a polyptych of colorful posters arranged as a display of Pantones contains some of its cultural references, like the Museo of the Prado, the movie Dogville, series The Wire… Here are other characteristic features of the artist, the fragmentation, the copy and serialization. The sample is filled with quotations where the printed word becomes the calligraphic text that it is, per se, a work of art, and photography is transformed into painting. Press images of great social and political charge drawn, original portraits of Janis Joplin, Shrimp, Lou Reed, Panero or Patricia Highsmith made for the book Stories of until y poetry, a tribute to Antonio Machado and Walter Benjamin through the locations where they are buried (Collioure and Portbou)… Tension between image and word in drawings, paintings, photographs and videos that give us an overview of the unattainable work of Mensua. S.M.
