In the first third of the 20th century, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán (1866-1936) formulated the concept of “esperpento” as a core of aesthetic thought for understanding reality from a perspective that required critical distance. Often synthesized in the metaphor of the concave mirror, esperpento crystallized a genuine form of the grotesque in which the deformed reflection of reality provoked a comic and satirical estrangement. The Spanish society of the time, dislocated and strongly anchored in the past, could only be put on stage with a puppeteer’s dexterity at turning the tables from beneath.
Valle-Inclán’s esperpento fed off procedures like distancing, animalization, or the conversion of characters into puppets. Besides incorporating popular formats like romances de ciego and aleluyas (stories in images), the satirical press, the early cinema, the theatrical revue, or the bululú (a comedian who performed plays by himself, changing his voice according to the characters), the writer’s full artistic program also connected with what was termed “the retheatricalization of the theatre”. In opposition to 19th-century realism, this trend attached greater importance to scenographic art and even altered the image of actresses and actors through masks and costumes that deformed or modified the human figure.
The set of materials selected for this exhibition covers a broad repertoire of disciplines, artworks, and documents that survey Valle-Inclán’s literary oeuvre and explore the potential of his proposals on the basis of the complex intersections between avant-garde, popular culture, and aesthetic revolution. The show begins by tracing a genealogy of esperpento through the relationship between device, vision, and corporality at the turn of the 20th century. Entitled Before Esperpento, the first section looks at some of the most outstanding satirical publications of the late 19th century, which are shown alongside a variety of optical apparatuses that were disseminated for popular entertainment. Although the roots of esperpento lie in the picaresque novel of the Golden Age and the work of Francisco de Goya (to whom the writer attributed the invention of esperpentismo), these other manifestations of 19th-century visual culture are read as a foretaste of the distortion and deformation that were to accompany the gestation of Valle-Inclán’s aesthetics.
Midnight Vision, the next section, focuses on what was called “vision from the heights” at the start of the 20th century. The change of scale brought about by the Great War, the alteration of states of consciousness through the use of drugs, and the cosmovision proposed by spiritualism and theosophy are congregated here as experiences that marked the Galician author and his contemporaries. Works like Umberto Boccioni’s triptych States of Mind (1911) not only evidence cracks running through the whole concept of mimesis but also evoke the physiological and psychic transformations that the experience of modernity brought about in the society of its time.
Puppet Stage and The Honor of Mr. Punch/Mardi Gras bring together elements and literary forms from popular tradition to signal Valle-Inclán’s disgust towards the governing powers and a social situation marked by violence against the other. The first section gathers materials linked to the stage of the time that connect Valle-Inclán’s farces with the European trend of the “retheatricalization of theatre” and the puppets of the Italian Vittorio Podrecca, whose Teatro dei Piccoli was a fundamental referent in the genesis of esperpento. In the second section, the context of the colonial wars and the trilogy Martes de carnaval (Mardi Gras, 1930) allows the popular energies of the Galician entroido festival, suggested by such multifarious works and artifacts as the paintings of Laxeiro and Rosario de Velasco or the masks that belonged to José Gutiérrez Solana, to be confronted with the supposed honor of the upper echelons of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.
Through different media like photography, collage, social painting, film, dance, or theatre, Bohemian Lights includes explicit references to the moment of social revolt and of the decline of bohemia that provides the setting for the ValleInclán’s play after which this section is named (in Spanish: Luces de bohemia). The deforming gaze of the mirror at the bottom of the glass closes in on the death of an epoch and heralds the emergence of a new time that shifts the focus onto the collective and the choral, also represented in the confluence of voices in the next section, Retables. This is centered on a model of composition or visual narrative that was revived by artists and writers with the goal of social regeneration or aesthetic renewal. The retables of Valle-Inclán place the emphasis on the degradation of values and ties permeating every level of society. Instincts, sins, and passions are interlaced in polyphonic narratives imbued with a mixture of religiosity and popular tradition that subverts the logic of the ordinary world.
The final part of the exhibition revolves around the narrative esperpentos of Valle-Inclán, written in an international context of rising fascisms. The incarnation of esperpento in the figure of the tyrant summarizes the room devoted to Tyrant Banderas. Here, a work by José Clemente Orozco exemplifies the grotesque deformation of the political leader: the degradation of the hero, the decrepit body seething with cruelty and impotence, arrogance and fear. On the basis of a contemporary reading of the novel, the Mexican group Lagartijas tiradas al sol presents No tengo por qué seguir soñando con los cadáveres que he visto [I have no reason to carry on dreaming about the corpses I have seen, 2024], a scenic installation that tries to respond to those esperpentos whose cruelty and anachronism surpasses the ones created by literary imagination.
The exhibition closes with the section The Iberian Arena, a reference to Valle-Inclán’s unfinished project for a cycle of novels entitled in Spanish El ruedo ibérico. As if the whole of the country’s history took place in a giant bullring that concentrated violence, politics, and spectacle, the deformity of reality crystallizes all the tensions prior to the Spanish Civil War, which appears as a non-narrated conclusion to the development of esperpento. This final section houses a sound mosaic by Maricel Álvarez and Marcelo Martínez, EL COSO [The ARENA, 2024], based on Cartel de ferias (Fiesta Poster, the fifth book of the second novel of The Iberian Arena), where festivity and violence coincide in a scene that synthesizes many dimensions of esperpento and its narratives, and also of this exhibition
