Amalia Avia, time at the doors

Rubielos de Mora, Teruel,

When, in September 2022, the Community of Madrid opened the exhibition “Japan in Los Angeles. The Archives of Amalia Avia” in its gallery at Alcalá 31, it had been a quarter of a century since this artist had had a solo exhibition; her works were only added to collective exhibitions around Madrid realism. In reality, she never wanted to share that label, that of realism, given that her methods were different; in addition, the name may have been one of the reasons why, after knowing success in life, her painting was, in some way, diluted among the production of those authors of her generation: I paint what I cannot photograph. I use photography as a model (…). My realist colleagues paint from nature.

That review, a couple of years ago, of Avia’s legacy was curated by Estrella de Diego, emphasizing precisely that distinguishing feature: the use of photographs that she or her family took, or that she found in the press, as a working tool. She used them as a starting point without any intention of taking them to her compositions from a literal perspective: rather, she developed, focusing on them (after cutting them, pasting them, intervening in them) scenes that, in the same way as snapshots, can be considered frozen moments, sentimental translations or documents of the passage of time filtered by her personality.

Once his objects were gathered together, they could be seen more as portraits with pop fragments than as still lifes, and in his urban landscapes we detected a conceptualization compatible with a portrait-like character of streets or shops, not always represented frontally.

Seventeen of the oil paintings on wood that we saw in Madrid are being exhibited this summer at the Salvador Victoria Museum in Rubielos de Mora (Teruel), in an exhibition called “The Memory of Doors”, a motif that is continually present in his interior and exterior scenes, of houses, grocery stores and shops, often dirty or worn by the years.

The capture of everyday life, from a perspective that is not specifically social but rather attentive to certain events of her time; with these cities emptied or almost emptied, especially Madrid but also Paris, Lisbon and some provincial capitals, and with the aforementioned portraits of objects attest to how little interest Avia had in copying and how much in suspended time; it is essential to understand her images to know that the complex spaces that they present to us and their de-hierarchization of themes have to do with the gaze trained in albums and archives that essentially documented the passing of time through buildings in decline. The artist was especially attracted to what is about to become extinct or has already disappeared, which is why she always envelops her works in a misty atmosphere.

This concern for capturing the material imprint, almost the touch, of deteriorated walls, humidity, peeling paint… led her to try to bring to her oil paintings and etchings on board reproductions of textures full of truth: her son, Rodrigo Muñoz Avia, has said that she used turpentine and lit matches to suggest what the brush could not convey (that is why she used these boards and not canvases, which would not have resisted these processes; methods that, on the other hand, indirectly relate her to contemporary informalists, as does her reduced palette, in which earth tones predominate).

The wear and tear of architecture, of broken signage in the streets, the closure of old shops and even the ageing of furniture are, in fact, the greatest human mark on her work, because the figures, when they appear, are presented to us anonymously, in a group but without interacting or, in the case of being alone, hiding their faces from us. And her portrayed objects, as we said, something more than still lifes, are also studies of frozen moments that offer those veiled tones that we can consider those of memory when it evokes, those of the necessarily intangible (when she did not paint from photographs, the author resorted to her memories).

In Rubielos de Mora, and in a presentation curated by Ricardo García Prats, director of the Salvador Victoria Museum, we are ultimately faced with closed, boarded up or half-open, peeling and suggestive doors, with no more or less history than that of anonymous use, although with many personal echoes that will surely be understood by those who shared a generation with Avia: upon the death of her father (killed in the Civil War, when she was a child) and that of her brothers (due to tuberculosis), her rooms would be closed and Amalia would begin to paint on the other side – where life did continue – years later. It is no coincidence that the artist’s memoirs, published in 2004 by Taurus, were entitled Behind closed doors; in them he reflected on his fondness for the dull palette: I don’t know what it is in me that prevents me from bringing color into my painting; bright or strong color, I mean, because my paintings do have color, always dull, softened, muffled, as if things wanted to simulate their possession and ask forgiveness for it. Many times I have been asked why this fog and I have always had to answer the truth: I don’t know.

Next to Milk dispatch (1994), St. Matthew’s Street (1974), The Japan of Angels (1995) or The Santander market (1988), one of Avia’s emblematic compositions that has reached Teruel is My house (1976), which reflects his Madrid home and which in the exhibition is related to the piece by Salvador Victoria Kas-kowhich dates back to the same period and belongs to the Muñoz Avia family, to the point of appearing in the first composition. They were great friends.