English
Approaching a painting today, in the 21st century, is undoubtedly a unique experience, knowing that we live in a time where digital image has surpassed the frontiers of utility and, without warning us, has become a way to measure the visual interaction that we have with the real and virtual world. From the surface of the image, we understand ideas, contexts, discourses, feelings that, with the growing speed of information, seem to become more and more blurred all the time. But the truth is that the images aren´t blurred or get erased, instead we´re facing a time in which each thought, idea, information and expression codes are going at a faster speed that, at times, surpasses us.
Here´s an exercise to understand this problem: stop and write after long hours in front a a computer but with a pencil or a pen. Try to be as sensitive to the movement of your hand as possible, and don´t think much when writing the letters, do it quickly. You´ll see how the quickness of your hands isn´t as fast as your thinking and, consequently, many letters are missing from the writing. It´s not lack of attention, it´s simply that in digital reality, the transmission processes are faster, and will carry on being faster until they remove writing, drawing, painting.
And so, approaching a painting by Chagali, for example, in this time of vertiginous computer technology, is still a luxury and an experience of a fictitious past that perhaps never happened, from which we don´t have any links or relations. From the neoliberal machinery in which global conduct resides and twists, from which we want to escape but feel encapsulated in, the link with a surface of oil canvas, wood, traces and colours, turns out to be something out of a market, a collection, a product that accumulates in a gallery or a museum, from the art market. On top of that, appreciating the importance of Chagali´s art, the surfaces of its canvases are material and not digital, they´re the trace of a subject in its highest expression, a subject that´s also off-centre, due to geography, politics and beliefs.
The Marc Chagali exhibition that´s presented in Madrid from the 14th of February at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and the Fundación Caja Madrid is the first great retrospective exhibition of this artist in Spain, and it´s worth seeing. At the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum you can find the best works by this fabulous artist during his stay in Paris and revolutionary Russia, until his exile in the United States during the 1940s. On the other hand, the rooms of the Fundación Caja Madrid will present the work of the artist that was made in the United States. Paintings, sculptures, stained glass and ceramics will also be exhibited.
For more information, visit the following webpage: http://www.museothyssen.org/thyssen/ficha_artista/153
Get apartments in Madrid and see its museums and galleries. Madrid is an important destination for all modern and contemporary art lovers.
