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: El pueblo español tiene un camino que conduce a una estrella (The Spanish people have a road that leads to a star). In it, a winding path climbed more than twelve metres to culminate in a Communist star with irregular contours.
Promenade (et promesse) is a photographic diptych featuring a model of The Spanish Village… attributed to Alberto. The model, carved in wood, comes from the Reina Sofia Museum’s storeroom. Due to its fragility, it 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 the photograph of Che Guevara, and is evidence of a phrase that John Berger and Nella Bielski put in Goya’s mouth: ‘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