UNTIL SUNDAY 16/4
F. BANCAJA. Pl. Gentlemen, 23
Al 2020 an iconic Valencian artist was missing, and it is only fair that the Bancaja Foundation pays tribute to him in the form of a retrospective for his sixty-year career. The human figure and political commitment are the recurring features of the work of Joan Genovés, especially at the beginning, in the sixties, in the middle of the Franco dictatorship. The pieces of that time, dark as the walls of the exhibition hall, they are inspired by images from newspapers and magazines of the time to launch a negative image of the repression of the dictatorship and the war. They are full of blood, agitation, hands up and bodies down, at times, using an optical effect that emulates the view from an airplane or a telephoto lens. In the seventies, dead dictator, would create his most celebrated work, Hug (1976), which you can see live at the foundation in all its size. Symbol of amnesty, democracy and transition, the painting inspired by children playing in the school yard became an icon of the Spanish collective memory.
"We lived better against Franco?” asked the insignia Manuel Vázquez Montalbán on more than one occasion. Well, artistically, Genoese, Yeah. With the arrival of democracy the Valencian suffered a creative crisis because his main theme for twenty years had been resistance to the regime and now there was no regime to oppose. He hit a turn, returned to the human figure at ninety, but captured from afar and from above, represented as points or unidentified silhouettes that are attracted by different axes forming complex compositions. Here there is calm and silence. In the 21st century he will continue to work on a silhouetted and material human figure, which is born from the canvas and is "dressed" with small objects found while walking: buttons, shells, globus… See here the painting he was working on before his death, unsigned, where he had time to give three-dimensional volume to the characters at the bottom (look for it, that has been hidden inside one of them) while those above remained bare and flat, unfinished. That's how death caught him, working. S.M.
