De colisiones en la autopista de la historia
Francesc Torres
With the collaboration of Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC)
The Galería Elba Benítez opened the new season with the project by Francesc Torres De colisiones en la autopista de la historia (Collisions on the highway of history). The exhibition used the gallery space to conjure up a reflection on the confluences of history, ideology and aesthetics that underlie and intersect art and the artistic impulse, and at by extension on the fraught state of art in our time.
The show centers around a series panel-paintings by Josep Maria Sert from the 1920’s which Torres has utilized as the basis for his own interpretive installation in the gallery, where he presents them in conjunction with a written text of his own — a text that is not auxiliary to but rather an integral part of the exhibition as a whole — in which he ruminates on the nature of art itself, historically and in our own time.
The large-scale panels were originally painted for the Vic Cathedral but damaged during the Spanish Civil War when anti-clerical and iconoclastic anarchist militias burned the cathedral; they were later removed and now form part of the collection of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (Barcelona), where they have been kept in storage. Conserved by the museum in their unrestored state, the panels today embody a sequence of seemingly inexorable events — “collisions”, in Torres’s terminology in the textual component of the exhibition — involving ideology, power, history and the functions of imagery. At the same time, the charred panels themselves, oscillating between abstraction and figuration, possess a remarkably potent visual and physical presence, despite — or rather because of — their semi-ruined, relic-like state.
De colisiones en la autopista de la historia was Francesc Torres’s fifth solo show at the Galería Elba Benítez and was part of the Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend 2019 program.
