Don Kikhot (Rectangle on square), 2017-19

Painting
Projection screen 100 x 100 cm.

 The film Don Kikhot (1957) was the first Russian film shot in cinemascope and the first colour film directed by Grigori Kozintsev. The artistic advisor and set designer for the film was the Spanish artist Alberto Sánchez, who was living in exile in Moscow at the time. One of Alberto’s merits was to make the Crimean landscape resemble that of the lands of La Mancha.

 This work replicates, through a painting on a square projection screen, the frame of the film with the title “Don Kikhot” – written in Cyrillic letters – superimposed on a landscape of La Mancha painted by Alberto. To emphasise the horizontality of the panoramic format, two black stripes have been painted on the square screen with the idea of symbolically indicating that the rectangular format refers to aesthetic conservatism and the square to avant-gardism (1). In this way, with this play of concealment between the background and the surface, the aim is to highlight the suffering that Alberto experienced when he renounced avant-garde art and submitted to Stalinist realism (2). A tragic renunciation that fits in with Kozintsev’s comment when he said: “No one was more like Don Quixote than Alberto himself”.

(1) Soviet avant-garde films, such as those made by Vertov or Eisenstein, had an almost square scale of 1.33:1, but with the advent of sound film, the frame gradually became horizontal because the optical sound track was recorded on one side of the reel. In the 1950s, with the advent of cinemascope, the frame became a fully rectangular scale of 2.66:1.

(2) In exile in Moscow, Alberto had to adapt to the realist canons dictated by the CPSU, even after Stalin’s death.

_______

Exhibition:
Theoretics of bread
Rosa Santos Gallery. Valencia. From 20 September to 22 November 2019.