UNTIL SUNDAY 10/1
CCCC. Museum, 2
The library of the Walt Disney Studios in California has books illustrated by José Segrelles. Animators around the world know the Albaida painter for a fantastic work that has engraved his name in golden letters on the Olympus of world illustration. A The exhibition José Segrelles. The fantastic illustrator we go straight to the tower of skulls created for the novel The dead rule, by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, that has been replicated so much. recently, in the movie 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple by Danny Boyle. After, we stop in front of the work The Glass Jar, based on a macabre nightmare of the artist: a group of monstrous dwarves drag a glass jar into which they have stuck their sister's head. These disturbing little characters inspired Frank Frazetta to draw the first representations of Gollum el 1973, who at the same time influenced John Howe and Alan Lee, the main illustrators in the film trilogy of The Lord of the Rings, de Peter Jackson. These back and forth influences that crossed continents are underlined more times throughout the show: you will see the painting that inspired the last one Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro—absolute devotee of the artist—and the sequence that unites Segrelles with The War of the Worlds, De Steven Spielberg, passing through the American science fiction magazine Galileo.
The influence of the Valencian on American fantasy cinema gains merit if we take into account that in his time the customs and naturalism bequeathed by Joaquín Sorolla prevailed. He was a century ahead and had the revelation when he saw the lithographs dDon Quixote by Gustave Doré: would be dedicated to the fantasy genre. In the exhibition you will find, precisely, the dexterity of Segrelles in the epic narrative embodied in Don Quixote—which he painted all his life—, together with mystical idealizations and the explosion of color that it entailed The thousand and one nights. He said so: “I’m not attracted to reality, street, in weight. I prefer mystical figures, mythological, the unreal beings of oriental fantasy”. The Divine Comedy by Dante, the seven deadly sins, the symphonic abstractions of Beethoven and Wagner, the aliens and monstrous beings, blue paintings and other fantasies alternate in a route that has sixty (sixty!) unpublished works that demonstrate the absolute mastery of José Segrelles. especially, in the use of a technique as difficult as watercolor, with which he was dared to become one outsider by whom, hui, surrender to him pleitesia cartoonists and filmmakers from around the world. S.M.
