UNTIL SUNDAY 1/2
VAT. Guillem de Castro, 118
Dare to more brings together two hundred works by fifty artists who dared to break with the academicism of the 19th century in Valencia. They decided that there was enough noise in the obscurity of the first fifteen years of Francoism, a period that has been considered wasteland in the cultural field. It seems that was not the case.
This exhibition — legacy of the previous director of the IVAM, Núria Enguita— it is not a packaged product that comes from outside, nor a dusting of the museum's funds. It is the result of a long investigation by two curators—Joan Ramón Escrivà and Nacho París—enthusiastic about tracing the work of artists and collectives that opened a gap in the most orthodox tradition of the moment, collectives such as Grupo Z, The Group 7 and the Parpalló Group, i artistes com Manolo i Jacinta Gil, Sempere, Genovés or Bayarri. They were students who mobilized in favor of the social function of art and against the absurd academicism with noise roots taught by the School of Fine Arts of Sant Carles, self-organizing exhibitions in bookstores and furniture stores. Escrivà and Peris have raised carpets throughout the territory to discover valuable pieces by these artists against the current, like those of Nassio Bayarri and Manuel Hernández Mompó in one place a priori little suspicious of hosting them like the El Pilar school in Valencia.
Dare in addition, we discover the work of two artistic collectives that until now had been nothing more than a footnote in the history of Valencian art: Group Z and Group Los 7. It also focuses on those artists who opted for evolution without revolution, rejecting academic mimicry but without neglecting order. And it reminds us that the history of art is not linear or static, that different languages and styles coexisted in space and time, even, within the same artist. It doesn't belong, so, the Manichaean debate between figuration and abstraction.
The exhibition also shows the emergence of hotel architecture, Goerlich's sheltered housing projects, the irruption of the nuclear Grup Parpalló and the importance of the mural within the new architectural works, such as that of Manuel Baeza for the swimming pavilions on the Postiguet beach in Alicante or that of Monjalés for the Hotel Astoria. But the moment the sample really swells the chest, is when he focuses his attention on the renewal of religious art in the fifties. Paradoxically, sacred art was a way of spreading new forms of artistic expression, which progressed in parallel with the construction of new churches that increasingly resembled civil constructions influenced by the rationalist movements of the time. Like the Virgin of the Remedies of Valencia, a clear example of the symbiosis between the work of an architect committed to the renewal of the constructive language and a group of artists linked to the Parpalló Group: Joaquin Michavila, Nassio Bayar i Esteve Edo. Pure integration of the arts. S.M.
