In the place of honor of the lobby of the headquarters of the Bank of Spain on Alcalá Street there is a great sculpture by Jorge Oteiza that is titled Praise of discontent. The title already gave the replica with healthy bad milk to the lirismo of the Horizon praise of Chillida in Gijón, but the piece hid another load of depth. He expanded a small model of his Tizo laboratory that he had titled This for Madrid! (Esto para madrid): The structure schematizes a great sleeve cut and was for Oteiza “a visual response from Euskadi to the centralism of the deafblind politicians of Madrid.”
That cut of sleeves in the same noses of capital power is still planted since 1992 and is an emblem of the peleona slyness of Oteiz Reason, prosper and polula and imanta impertérrite the worst and best of the illusory state-nation Berroqueño that the Austrias dreamed.
David Besué places the model as a minister at the beginning of the brilliant major parable that is Hispania flower. It brings together many spiky works in the CA2M (but not only) collection and his recent work to assemble a portrait and a story of Madrid as a city and as an idea, as a place where the lives of millions of people and the dreams, abuses and delusions of power are embalmed: some and others Paris and also the pragmatic and liberal proliferation of London: the city is a kind of scrap that works and overflows and resists the summary.
I kissed proposes to tell it from a North-South fundamental opposition: above, the granite of El Escorial and Coldgamuros, the Neoherreriana and Malrrollera stone, the Palco del Bernabéu, those reserved in Quintín and Amazon, the great towers of corporate power and the stoning and aspirational pijerio of Sanchinarro or the tables. It is embodied by the everlasting Menina of Manolo Valdés, Foster’s models, the Sesting Nañatos de Serrano of Gonzalo Juanes’ photos.
Under, the red brick and mudéjar, the popular neighborhoods and the architecture of alluvion of the postwar period, the athleti and the lightning Valdemingómez stomach.
It is an effective carpentry to synthesize the complex, which inevitably leaves in nobody glitch In each great story: the photographs of dark rooms of Álvaro Perdices, the scanned of revocal of Patricia Esquivias as sample of the bacterial flora of the city, the monument to the Tizendo Veneno and with flowers in the Casa de Campo, the tastings in his subsoil of Lara Almárcegui.
The solidity and poetic breath of the exhibition is due to the erudition and the eye of Lince for the eloquent detail of this artist
The solidity and poetic breath of this exposure-work comes from the scholarship and the eye of lynx for the eloquent and revealing detail of Besué, which has been working on works, exhibitions and books for many years to “capture the country’s affective life.” The one that at the same time hides and is shown for those who know how to look in a territory and architecture that is also political and moral landscape.
They were on the same line their lucid The Escorial, Empire and Stomach (Caniche, 2021) and two previous memorable exhibitions: City of sandin Fabra I Coats in 2023, which applied the same method to the portrait of a Barcelona split between its anarchic and reception tradition, the nationalist repetitions and the balls of successive widening, Olympics and Forums; and Rosi Lovein the basements never seen of the queen in 2018, which already launched to distill the essence of the many faces (El Escorial, Las Tablas, Vallecas) of Madrid.
The new pieces that interspersed in this exhibition are exercises of a similar alchemy: as in Rosi LoveI kissed we put together a mental rebound where master formulas, distilled and precipitated. Their sculptures work through amalgam and sometimes literal crushing of ideas and substances. For example, when reproduced in resin the ceiling and tensioners designed by Moneo for the Atocha station and incorporates poppy petals of the fields of the southern Madrid, Ciprés de Aranjuez and Bridas to evoke that node of the center and the periphery where the geopolitics and lives of the people on foot crystallized when the attacks of 2004.
Banks, ministries, airbnbsNeotascas, pseudomajismo ayusista, new neighborhoods in Usera and Legazpi: all that fits in the bittersweet distillate of Besué. Borja Casani says in the very thoughtful publication to accompany the expo that in Madrid at the end “what he sends is the story of the pasta.” But he also warns that in it the changes always come inadvertent, brought by the unstoppable current of the interests and customs of the people: “When you stop to look at them they may seem horrible, but that has always happened.”
David I kissed. Flor Hispania ‘. CA2M. Móstoles (Madrid). Until August 24.
