Sáez Castán, Escrig and Adela Moreno: about Huesca people and ways of living

Huesca,

Since 2002, the Huesca Provincial Council has organized its Ramón Acín call for artistic creation, aimed at projects from any discipline that establish clear lines of research in relation to the career of their authors.

Endowed with up to 12,000 euros, it has so far gone to artists such as José Noguero, Javier Codesal, Alicia Framis, Antonio Fernández Alvira, Sara Álvarez, Gema Rupérez, Enrique Radigales or Esther Pizarro and includes the possibility of offering an exhibition project.

In 2023 and 2024, the selected ones have been Javier Sáez Castán and Adela Moreno, both creators from Huesca who, until next February, exhibit their works at the Provincial Council: “Oscensario” and “Allí donde se vol”, respectively.

The first, author of a good number of illustrated books and winner of the National Illustration Prize in 2016, displays a collection of drawings about 150 characters from the province and from all periods that, after being awarded in 2023, evolved into a book the following year.

Conceived as a documentary and fictional monument to these characters, charnel house It draws on the texts of the university professor José Antonio Escrig and also represents an attempt to recover traditions such as those of altarpieces or martyrologies… without solemnity. Its lines have been made with a pen and in a synthetic style, with an air between ancient and popular that refers to widespread engravings and the funerary portraits of El Fayum. This proposal is also linked by Sáez Castán to the conception of society according to Edmund Burke: A contract between those who have died, those who are alive and those who are yet to be born.

In their diversity, and in addition to their ties with Huesca, those portrayed have some notes in common: they share fame, anonymity or legend; the fact of being dead; the precision of the pen line; close-ups and lost gaze in the same direction; asepsis in expression; and respectful or devoted treatment. The well-known alternate with the rare, and the kings with the artisans, achieving a varied general effect.

Therefore combine this charnel houseaccording to its creators, an integrative vocation (that of putting everything necessary in the same bag), an inclination towards the multiple and horror vacui, in accordance with the economy of space common in popular arts. Between one figure and another we can also find unexpected or almost secret links.

Javier Sáez Castán. Oscenary. Huesca Provincial Council Exhibition Hall

As for “Allá donde se vol”, Adela Moreno’s proposal, it is a reflection on the act of living beyond its physical dimension: regarding the ties between the individual and their environment. The starting point of this young artist has been certain theses of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who already warned that living is equivalent to existing and that existence does not only have to do with architecture.

In addition to being a refuge, our home is a space for memory, thought, identity or experience: a setting where we feel potentially protected or alone. The home is only such when the construction is given meaning; when one resides in it, but also thinks and is.

This exhibition consists of installations, performances, videos and photographs in which the domestic, the corporal and the affective come together, and these three concepts structure as many sections of the exhibition: Inhabit the house, Inhabit the memory and Inhabit the body.

Adela Moreno. Wherever it turns. Huesca Provincial Council Exhibition Hall

In the first we will see to my housean investigation into the popular architecture of Huesca towns from the daily and intimate action of looking out the window, situated halfway between the private and the public; To reforma compilation of images of homes in Idealista under that heading, with many mental houses, and a sculpture that assembles fictitious rooms; either vital housesa work made from the extraction of layers of wallpaper belonging to the walls of a home in a rural environment. Without denying their value as a testimony to the passage of time, new visual compositions are generated with them.

Inhabit memory opens with Trousseau, a selection of different textiles belonging to a family heirloom, to whose function emotional readings are added; to continue with My grandmother’s rocking chairsthe intervention on a piece of furniture worn by time and also linked to family memory; One day it was emptythe opening to the public of an inherited closet; either Adelathe embroidery of the name taking as reference the different ways in which it has been written by other people: family, friends, acquaintances or brief contacts. It alludes to the construction or deconstruction of a name and an identity between permanence and transformation.

Finally, the axis of inhabit the body is first housewhich invites us to think of our skin as a primal home from which to try out the various ways of living. In all of these works, Moreno proposes working with reality and with the most basic gestures of daily life as artistic material and as a way to question ourselves about our existence.