UNTIL SUNDAY 10/9
F. BANCAJA. Pl. Tetouan, 23
For those who don't know, it is 2023 one hundred years since the death of Joaquín Sorolla is commemorated, That's why we have two exhibitions in Valencia (and those to come) dedicated to the illustrious Valencian painter: Sorolla to Rome in the Palau Marqués de Scala of the Provincial Council of Valencia and Sorolla. origins at the Museum of Fine Arts. Now the Bancaja Foundation joins the party, institution very committed to reviewing Sorolla's career (They are exhibitions of guaranteed success) that this year, besides, celebrates its tenth anniversary. Childhood has taught us in Sorolla's paintings, the gardens, his drawings and his women, the most impressionistic Sorolla and, now, the Sorolla with a less colorful palette. Sorolla in black comes to tell us that the master of light and color knew how to use the color black with very diverse objectives.. To convey elegance in silk dresses that denoted the good taste of those portrayed., exploiting its symbolic power in the expression of decadence and pessimism, in monochrome paintings of melancholic landscapes, and as a light enhancer. Indeed, Black, by contrast, enhances the colors that surround it and comes here to dilute that dichotomy between the black Spain of Zuloaga and the white Spain of Sorolla, accused of frivolity from certain sides. The Bancaja Foundation has brought together a good number of institutions and private collectors in this exhibition that contains forty works never seen in Valencia and eleven never seen at all., a major achievement. The symbolic use of black is appreciated, For example, in the “tortured” Sevillian Nazarenes that Sorolla painted for the Hispanic Society, in the religious habit that appears in the enormous painting sad inheritance property of the foundation or in the procuress (procurer) who watches how his four prostitutes sleep in the social-themed painting White slave traffic. The use of darkness to enhance the light and enforce the decorative sense of the scene (influence of the Japanese print) It is present in beach paintings where the violet shadows of boats and sails appear projected.. The gray associated with cosmopolitanism is carried by the painter's beloved wife on the canvas Clotilde in gray suit (1900) and the gray monochromes draw sad and stormy beaches that act as a counterpoint to the bright and optimistic ones that have remained in the collective imagination associated with the Valencian's painting.. Bored of always seeing the same thing from Sorolla?? Bancaja invites you to look at it differently. S.M.
