Galeria Mayoral is celebrating 35 years devoted to modern and contemporary art. The brilliant artists from the most iconic avant-garde share a space with those of the Spanish postwar period and those from younger generations who have metabolized globalization at the speed of light. The world of art, as it takes shape in the gallery’s space, shows great heterogeneity. This does not, however, undervalue it. In the absence of a common denominator, connections and links are created that are stronger than we could imagine. The works of artists often associated with the canon of the avant-garde resist playing the role of ghosts of the present. Furthermore, the work of younger authors seems to be an endless screw suggesting continuity and difference at the same time. Seen together, they are radically unique, radically different.
If we champion difference rather than homogeneity, the 20th century appears to be a sequence of irreconcilable personalities. So unique that nothing links them. We could say that the systematic production of difference produced a heroic history of art. On the contrary, if we highlight the similarities, the ties and the relations between them, we see a calculated progress that suggests an endless line. So far this model does not apply to the 21st century either. Catastrophes, rather than difference or homogeneity, dictate the order of a creativity of the masses characteristic of the world of art. Individual creativity is beginning to be seen as the remains of a system that has left us with lists of artists, but which has ignored the effect of all this. The logic of imitation, as supported by the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, still has to prove to us that it is stronger than an abstract notion of invention.
A list of artists that go from the avant-gardes to the most up-to-date contemporaneity renounces any common trait, but can produce analogies and, why not, friendships which challenge chronological limits. The potential is still intact. Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Antoni Tàpies, Eduardo Chillida, Juana Francés, Fernando Zóbel, Aurèlia Muñoz, Antonio Saura, Magda Bolumar, Eulàlia Grau, Marga Ximénez, José Pérez Ocaña, Martina Pla, Jordi Alcaraz, Francisco Taka Fernández, Darío Escobar, José Carlos Martinat, Albert Serra, Marria Pratts and Maxwell Alexandre are all part of the same school, that which Salvador Dalí and René Crevel improvised in premises of the Workers and Peasants' Bloc in 1931 in Barcelona. Shortly afterwards, in 1933, Dalí recognized the loyalty of his friend Crevel in a drawing. In the dedication we can clearly read “A René Crevel très amicallement [amicalement]”.
This “amicallement”, with spelling mistake included, reinforced an ideological and political complicity such as the one that they portrayed, in two lectures, on 18 September 1931 at the Sala Capcir in carrer dels Mercaders in Barcelona. It was then a question of lighting the match of the mystery of Surrealism with a political charge that ran the risk of going out too soon. This “amicallement” therefore evoked a turbulent history of friendship and militancy. A moment of the greatest intensity. So much so that Crevel took his own life in 1935 and, shortly afterwards, Dalí became the master of demagoguery, a populist avant la lettre. If we were to stage an exhibition under the sign of this “amicallement”, it would be like making complicity a banner despite its transitory nature. Ideas and forces that last as long as they last.
This is not, however, only possible between figures touched by the romanticism of the avant-garde. There is also the example of Albert Serra, a very contemporary filmmaker. After premiering the film The Death of Louis XIV at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, he produced a piece entitled Roi Soleil. With the film already made, Albert Serra conceived a performance which recorded the original idea of the whole project. Initially, he wanted to depict the agonizing of a legend of French cinema, Jean-Pierre Léaud, who would portray a moribund Sun King in the middle of the hall of the Centre Pompidou, through which thousands of people pass each day. In the end, however, it was his friend Lluís Serrat who incarnated the monarch lying on the floor of the Galería Graça Brandão in Lisbon. The images show him abandoned in the middle of a stripped gallery with the public gradually arriving. The filming, bathed in red light, recalls Andy Warhol’s film documentaries where he portrayed the Factory group at times of collective delirium. That circle, where any gesture came to be part of a wretchedly productive factory, but where it was impossible to know what catalyzed all the added value. This doubt, not knowing where invention, productivity and the mechanisms of intellectual progress lie, deprives us of any criterion to attempt to put in order what at first sight seems to be too heterogeneous, too diverse. But, after careful consideration, maybe it isn’t. Perhaps homogeneity nestles where there appear to be insurmountable differences. An equation that fits in well with a world that suggests a maximum of local freedom under a form of globalized control. Paradoxes with which we have to live.
Carles Guerra