Bezo, Creor and Solana, the possible banquet

Madrid,

In this 2025 a decade ago since José Luis Serzo presented at the ABC Museum, within the framework of the program Connectionswhich then organized this center with the Banco Santander Foundation, which until then was its greatest exhibition in the capital: “essays for a great work”. It composed fundamentally of drawings, two of them of extensive format – more conceptual some, others more intimate – that articulated their own story from two works that were part of the funds of those institutions: works by Ignacio Pinazo and Sileno.

The exhibition that the Álvaro Alcázar Gallery in Madrid now also represents a conversation with two artists from the past, but from different perspectives. He explains that, during a trip to Belgium, he decided to visit in Ostende the house museum of James Ensor, one of the authors who with greater rawness let his work materialize the spiritual crises of the late nineteenth century. He began painting some of the most humble characters in his city to gradually take a path of individual rebellion against the hypocrisies that he said he found in the bourgeoisie of his time; He displayed a very incisive and pathetic humor that reflected in grotesque fantasies of masks and skulls. His allegories and symbols interspersed with comedy, absurd and the dire. It is difficult to know if the loneliness that he cultivated almost with care during his life was cause, consequence (or both options, or none) of those compositions.

In the Creator Museum of The entrance of Christ in Brusselshe imagined being what would have happened if Ensor had met Gutiérrez Solana, what conversation they had maintained or how awkward his silence would have been. The Madrid, who also began being interested in the humble and more powerful flavor of the capital, chose to devise with those popular types alignments of sinister beings with dark background and gloomy air; He shared with the Belgian painter, who was his contemporary, his taste for the macabre and for the masks, a surreal and hallucinated air, although the Solana palette was more austere, with brownish tones of eschatological resonances.

Since it was very difficult for him to put words to his talk, he chose to be to recreate it in his drawing notebook. Based on those common concerns that we have mentioned, many historians have related their work, but it is really unknown what could think of each other.

José Luis Serzo. Desktop masquerade, 2025

From the paper, that imaginary encounter has jumped to the sculpture in this exhibition, entitled precisely “desktop masquerade. Tribute to an uncomfortable silence between Ensor & Solana”: it is a real -size piece in which average among them, at their common table, what united them; In words of being: A mash of masks, a huge pile of juicy masks, or even rotten, full of devils, skulls, deformed jesters, peripatetic sperpents, perhaps some witch, bird woman or lizard. Empty faces spreading throughout the table as the main dish, or to accompany the silence of desserts between these two disturbing painters.

To underline, in addition, that hypothetical tension of silence, the table and the chairs have run out of legs, so that the protagonists remain sitting in the air in precarious equilibrium, and holding themselves the board.

This work is accompanied in the sample, precisely, of representations of other possible meetings and of some more of those masks that were conceived that they could have painted or elucidate. Obviously, he also is part of this mysterious and mortuary desktop; The carnival is an inseparable substrate of his work, linked from its beginnings to the imagery of popular art (giants and heads), to the desire to capture a another reality (fears and desires usually hidden) and distorted symmetries.