Promenade (et promesse), 2016

Photographic diptych: 44 x 66 cms c.u.
Digital print mounted on wood.
Ed. 3 + 2 P. A.

One of the most significant works in the Spanish Pavilion in 1937 was the sculpture by Alberto Sánchez entitled El pueblo español tiene un camino que conduce a una estrella (The Spanish people have a road leading to a star). In it, a winding path ascended more than twelve metres in height to culminate in a communist star with irregular contours.

Promenade (et promesse) is a photographic diptych featuring a model of El pueblo español tiene un camino… attributed to Alberto. The model, carved in wood, comes from the Reina Sofía Museum’s storeroom and, due to its fragility, is wrapped in foam and placed horizontally inside a box. The sculpture, in a recumbent position and with the foam simulating a shroud, evokes the “mortuary” state of that promising socialising future dreamt of by Alberto. This symbolism reminds us of other corpses stripped of their aura, such as Holbein’s dead Christ or that of Che Guevara, and is evidence of what Goya says in a sentence imagined by John Berger and Nella Bielski: “When someone is dead, you know it at a distance of 200 metres. The silhouette remains cold” (1).

(1) Berger, John; Bielski, Nella. El último retrato de Goya. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1996, p.38

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Exhibition:
Presence and Absence
G6 Gallery. IVAM. Valencia. From 26 January to 7 May 2017.