UNTIL SUNDAY 19/10
F. Bancaja. Pl. Tetouan, 23
espadrilles, Morellan blankets, dawn, a ball game and many oranges sprinkle this exhibition on Valencian painting of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Bancaja Foundation usually dedicates an exhibition a year to Joaquín Sorolla (minimum) —it is a symbol of our city and a guaranteed hit with the public—, but the curator of this show that the institution is now presenting to us, Javier Perez Rojas, struck a blow on the table in this sense: we tend to focus on just one painter and leave the rest aside, just when the Valencian school was one of the most outstanding of the medieval period. It is a reference, obviously, to the overwhelming master Sorolla. Certainly, he is embedded within this route that outlines the costumist drift of Valencian genre painting, but so are Pinazo, Godfather, Mongrell, Degrain, Pla, Kingdom or Secrets, and many others that Bancaja sweeps us under the carpet. indeed, we are a little fed up with Sorolla. Having said that, and view this exhibition that oozes Valencianness on all four sides, it is clear that his pictorial talent was above any other and that he deservedly earned the fame he has.
Customism is not a style, it's a topic, and although in him the kind and aesthetic vision of the scenes predominates, it has been traversed by the different currents that alternated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Romanticism and realism, obvi, but also art deco, that permeates, for example, the July Fair poster of 1929 by Josep Renau. Or the impressionism of Luis Dubón (that of the famous allegory of the Spanish Republic of 1931) in the colorful Valencian farmer of 1917. These are two pieces that show that customs were not rigid, nor was he isolated, I didn't even live outside modern. Is more, customism was crossed by social realism - Fillol is the clear example - and stood up to academicism at a given moment, when its realistic side bumped noses against the idealization that marked the canon. Yeah, some orange pickers look like Byzantine characters, but there are others like the Albufera rice workers with hunched backs who seek realism.
The multiple faces of customs are evident in the central core of the route, where we find a triad formed by The Palleter's Cry, by Joaquín Sorolla (heroic); Tribunal of waters, by Bernardo Ferrándiz (historical); i twelve o'clock, de Cecilio Pla i Gallardo (idealized). The picture is missing here Last moments of King James I The Conqueror from Pinazo, property of the Prado, but it has not been possible to travel to Valencia. They have managed to exhibit paintings never seen in Valencia, from Pinazo or Sorolla, the icing on the cakea proposal that shows the most genuine expressions of traditions and popular culture (L’Horta, the sea, the Albufera, the Valencian woman or the popular religiosity) passed through the sieve of hedonism, the social theme, or the decorative and aesthetic purpose. S.M.
