UNTIL SUNDAY 30/7
F. BANCAJA. Pl. Tattoo, 23
Belgium was founded on 1830, just two centuries ago, that is to say, that between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was a country that sought its identity, also through art. The exhibition Belgian art. Magritte impressionism of the Bancaja Foundation offers us a selection of the great masterpieces of Belgian modern art belonging to the collection of the Ixelles Museum Brussels presented chronologically, With surrealism as a great locomotive and René Magritte at the head. It is no accident that appears embedded in the title of the exhibition, The reason is that your name sells. In Belgium sow there was courage and desire to experiment maintaining a fine balance between foreign influence (mainly) And its own identity with flamenco inheritances that was marked by enigmatic atmospheres, The dreamlike, Humor and absurd. Regarding Flemish inheritance, There is the magnificent The mannequin of JEAN DE LA HOESE With clear reminiscences of Jan van Eyck, One of the most shocking pictures of the exhibition.
Let's start at the end, for surrealism, that in the Belgian case crystallized in a very particular way. It is a surrealism based on reality, the dreams and the mystical that does not deform the forms or deconstructs the reality. René Magritte, Pioneer of conceptual art, Orthodox surrealism was distanced that it was marked from Paris by freely interpreting the doctrines of the movement. In this exhibition appears the iconic silhouette of man with bombin in the work The happy donor (1966), A kind of artist's will - he would move a year later - that congregates his most representative universe: The self -portrait with the fungus hat, The night landscape and small enigmatic objects.
But the tour begins in the second half of the nineteenth century where the art attached to the real will derive towards the exploration of the local landscape and towards social realism represented by Constantin Meunier, that sacralizes the labor world in a much more positive tone than the one that prevailed, For example, In France. In the decade of 1880 Many Belgian artists would be encouraged to experiment with the light and color seduced by impressionist and pointed techniques, people like Jan Toorop (The Lady of the umbrella) o James Ensor, A painter on horseback between impressionism and expressionism that worked extravagant themes with a very personal colorist style. Yours is the picture Christ calming the storm (1906) of custoding paint that captures the vibrant moment of water stirred by the wind, A clear note of what was going to be the Belgian posterior impressionism. The symbolism with his dream and disturbing worlds opened the door to a properly vanguard, represented, among others, by Jos Albert. Albert opted for the use of pure color derived from French Fauvism in The great interior (1914) that exposes outstanding banjaja, and Belgian expressionist art, much softer than the German, It will focus on rural and intimate scenes of earthly colors and simple shapes. We close the circle back to surrealism with the magritte enigmatic paintings that challenge the viewer to decipher hidden codes, and the theatrical scenographies of classical architecture occupied by naked and impassive female figures of Paul Delavaux. With them this panoramic view of the Bancaja Foundation on the main pictorial trends developed in Belgium from the end of the 19th century to the mid -twentieth century. S.M.
