THE SHIP. University, 2
La Nau opens the season questioning the virtues of art. The exhibition room collects a series of works carried out by the Archive F.X., a project by the artist Pedro G. Romero who relates modern aesthetics to iconoclasm, profanation and blasphemy. The main protagonists are three txeks reconstructed to a natural scale designed by Alfonso Laurencic in the convent of Santa Úrsula in Valencia and in two churches in Barcelona in between 1937 i 1939. And what were the checks?? Well, illegal detention centers that both sides of the Spanish Civil War used for torture. The particularity of these txeks (with "k") designed by Laurencic for the republicans is that the walls were painted with elements of modern art, especially of the Bauhaus years of Wassily Kandinski, to apply psychotechnical tortures on the prisoners in their tiny rooms. supposedly, the lines, circles, checkers and spirals cause hallucinations when looked at for a long time, and together with other elements such as stone tiles on the floor so that the prisoner could not walk, sloping benches that prevented sitting down to rest and clocks that change the time made up a sophisticated (but not very effective) torture mechanisms. The end of art, indeed, it can be very perverse. S.M.
