Idea: Painting-Force

Encounter

November 15, 2013 - 6:00 p.m.
Place
Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Exhibition view. Idea: Pintura Fuerza, 2013
Exhibition view. Idea: Pintura Fuerza, 2013

With the participation of Armando Montesinos, Mariano Navarro and Juan Pablo Wert, this activity presents the exhibition Idea: Painting-Force. Like the exhibition, the colloquium examines one of the last periods, from 1978 to 1984, in which painting was the main medium in intellectual debates and it had a public dimension that is vital for understanding art during Spain’s transition to democracy.  

Idea: Painting-Force is a specific inquiry into five painters – Alfonso Albacete, Miguel Ángel Campano, Ferrán García Sevilla, Juan Navarro Baldeweg and Manolo Quejido – that uncovers five differentiated discourses concerning the pictorial. This discursive eclecticism combines practices that appear to be antithetical to one other, such as painting and visual poetry in the case of Manolo Quejido or painting and conceptual art in the case of Ferrán García Sevilla, and it also brings back seeming cul-de-sacs in the modern genealogy of painting, such as the influence of José Guerrero on Miguel Ángel Campano and Alfonso Albacete. By doing so, the exhibition shows the exercise of painting as a permeable practice, thus confronting one of the main critical accusations put forward against the period: that painting is an isolated phenomenon.

Through three presentations quite different from each other, the encounter broadens earlier lines of work, such as the one put forward in Schizos in Madrid. Madrid’s figurative movement in the 70s, and attempts to delve more deeply into the period, showing some of its contradictions.

Program

6:00 p.m. Armando Montesinos. Genesis of the exhibition Idea: Painting-Force.

6:40 p.m. Juan Pablo Wert. History and the Academy in the artistic culture of the Transition

Break

7:00 p.m. Mariano Navarro. The Critical Gaze

7:40 p.m. Round table

Participants  

Armando Montesinos, professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Cuenca (Universidad de Castilla La Mancha). He has written about and curated, both individually and collectively, on a wide range of artists from this period. He has been the director of the galleries Fernando Vijande, Juana Mordó and Helga de Alvear and deputy director of the program La Edad de Oro, aired by TVE-2. He is the curator of Idea: Painting-Force. On the hinge between the 70s and 80s (Museo Reina Sofía, November 2013-May 2014).

Mariano Navarro, art critic and curator. From the mid seventies to the present he has worked as a critic in media such as El País, ABC, La Razón and El Cultural, the art magazine of the newspaper El Mundo. He contributes regularly to the journal Artecontexto. Among many other exhibitions, he curated Public Spaces –Private Dreams (Comunidad de Madrid, 1994), Images of abstraction: Spanish painting and sculpture 1969-1989 (Fundación Caja Madrid, 1999), Andalusia and modernity: From Equipo 57 to the 1970s generation (CAAC, Seville, 2002), The Guerrero Effect (Centro José Guerrero, Granada, 2006) and No Reality, No Utopia (The Political Constitution of the Present) (CAAC, Seville and Yerbabuena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2011 and 2012).  

Juan Pablo Wert Ortega, professor of Art History at the Faculty of Letters of Ciudad Real (Universidad de Castilla La Mancha). He has written extensively on film and art during the Spanish transition to democracy and the related cultural scenes, in different group publications, conferences and research projects. Of particular interest is his participation in Disagreements. On art, politics and the public sphere in Spain, and his role as co-curator of Schizos of Madrid (Museo Reina Sofía, Fundación Suñol and CAAC, 2009).