The Crystal Palace, one of the exhibition venues of the Reina Sofia Museum in El Retiro Park, is currently the subject of restoration and repair works that prevent its opening. In order for this space to continue supporting, during its closure period, the current public art exhibition, the MNCARS has announced that it will invite different authors to work outside.
The first of them has been Miguel Ángel Tornero from Jaén, who presents from today large friezea work designed specifically for the canvas that covers Ricardo Velázquez Bosco’s building during its remodeling. Linking this proposal with his latest creations, he has started from photographs taken in his daily life, in the area of Madrid where he lives, and that portray everything from the most apparently banal aspects of social interactions in the capital to architectures linked to power. . These images – fragments of a greater reality – are cut out, superimposed and exchanged scales and motifs to generate complex collages, which thus constitute some of the many possible representations of the city.
Manuel Segade, director of the Reina Sofía Museum, has today linked the ultimate purpose of this composition with the classical tradition: It shows a visual narrative that is discovered when surrounding the building; but where the friezes of the tradition of classical temples told of great deeds, Tornero takes the pulse of the city in its mundane mythologies, giving space to life itself. Tornero’s work has been referred to as a fragmented mirror of the city, a kind of recent urban archeology that combines the everyday and the symbolic, the ephemeral and the permanent. The images, assembled in an almost artisanal game, become a kind of urban chronicle that invites us to reflect on the drift of contemporary cities and on the tensions between the monumental and the everyday, between the intimate and the public.
The process of creating the piece was also closely linked to the intimate and everyday: it began by manipulating the cutouts of small printed photographs, gluing them to each other with household adhesive tape. He then arranged them on a wooden and cardboard model that reproduces the architecture, to finally be photographed.
The resulting canvas reproduces those shots on a scale of more than six meters, in an exercise of radical change of proportions, so that the original structure seems to support the Palace with its cardboard props. The images of Madrid thus become still lifes with an urban dimension, but that same monumental condition converts this large frieze in a huge diorama, which in turn refers to the current state of the interior under construction of the building, which in this way does not completely lose its characteristic transparency.