Madrid,
Just a few months after putting an end to her exhibition activity at the Marlborough Gallery, her usual venue until last June (we will soon find her at Maisterravalbuena), Soledad Sevilla is now presenting at the Reina Sofía Museum a long-awaited and well-deserved retrospective that reviews her nearly sixty-year career, emphasizing the coherence of her entire production. In fact, the rooms that contain her earliest and most recent work are located next to each other, so that we can contemplate the beginning and the present of a process that she has always claimed to understand as that of always painting the same picture.
“Rhythms, plots, variables”, as this exhibition, curated by Isabel Tejera, has been called, brings together his first geometric abstractions; his immersion in the Computing Centre of the Complutense University, which would strengthen the links between art and disciplines such as music and architecture; his most emotional abstractions from the eighties; his plant-inspired pieces or his creations inspired by the work of his friend Eusebio Sempere. Throughout this journey that has never stopped (when he suffered health problems, he adapted his work to those circumstances), we will contemplate compositions based on the constant but never equal application of modules, lines, plots, variations and rhythms, normally in large formats and, especially since forty years ago, claiming the suggestive, emotional possibilities of the abstract.
This suggestive capacity often has to do with its sources, which as she says cannot be sought but are imperatively found: from the light of the evening in the Patio de los Leones of the Alhambra to the drying rooms of Granada, passing through the Apostolate of Rubens, Guido Reni and his Hippomenes and Atalantaruins in Syria, vegetation on a wall, plastic in greenhouses or the concerns of her young students about the passing of time.
Sevilla was trained in the first half of the sixties at the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts and, like other authors of his generation (Asins, Yturralde, Teixidor, Lola Bosshard), the academic normativism of teaching at that time and the influence of the aforementioned Sempere soon led him to abstraction and a geometry that has never been linked to coldness.
His first compositions, both pictorial and three-dimensional (we will see some methacrylate at the Reina Sofía), were based on lines, symmetry and superposition; later, they were also based on the grid. In fact, Mondrian was another of his references and he named a piece from 1973 after him, which would serve as a basis for trying to construct, in the seventies, a conception of space based on depth and colour, which he would deploy in modules of pentagons or hexagons. He would draw superimposed lines or interspersed with grids in drawings, he would take them to very variable developments and even to large-format, white and light paintings, and the reflections that these procedures aroused in him were expressed in a text, Perceptual analysis and development of a biomorphic network composed of two squares. Fibonacci ratiowhich earned him a scholarship from the March Foundation in 1979.
Years before, he had attended seminars on the automatic generation of plastic forms at the aforementioned Computing Center, which encouraged meetings between artists, musicians, designers, mathematicians and computer scientists; he participated in enriching debates there, but his incursions into computer processes when establishing modules and serial forms would not go much further: the computer did not offer him the agility he desired, in the presentation of this anthology he referred to it as a clumsy pencil.
Another scholarship, from the Joint Hispanic-American Committee, allowed him to go to Harvard University between 1980 and 1982, where he was able to advance in the generation of spatial interventions that structure sensory experiences. In addition to a project that never materialized, Seven Days of Solitudein which he experimented with the performative side of expanded painting from diagonal lines drawn on the ground, in the United States he carried out series (Stella, Keiko, Belmont) that we can understand as antecedents of what, already in Spain, he would dedicate to The Meninasappealing in its lines and plots to the air, space and light of Velázquez’s composition. It is one of his fundamental ensembles, articulated using the line of the painter’s canvas within the painting as its axis; Seville was moved to learn that the Baroque genius had not previously drawn the figures with greater or lesser detail, he had only marked out patches, a trait of modernity that was not expected in 1656.
The culmination of these efforts to capture the physical and the metaphysical in abstract compositions is found in the series Alhambraswhere depth is achieved through interwoven plots. The starting point and non-figurative development are combined in a refined ambiguity; Sevilla explains that this theme provides him with the tension necessary to remain halfway between an abstraction that disdains its own system and a figuration that flees from the direct image and even from metaphorical reference.
Some pieces were based on the observation of the lines and lighting of specific spaces at a time when the Alhambra did not receive the flow of visitors it does today; this was the case of the Cuarto Dorado, the Patio de los Leones or the Salón de Comares: poems found in the plasterwork give title to these works, which in the Reina Sofía are arranged in montages that, due to their large formats and the proximity between the fabrics, Tejera christens as painting installedThere is a reason why the Valencian artist repeatedly works in series: she understands that her analyses cannot be resolved in a single image, that dialogue between several is necessary.
Sometimes the third dimension is also required: if in Boston you resorted to long rolls of paper kraft to intervene in the facades of the University, years later it would give shape to the celebrated Milk and blood in the Montenegro Gallery, whose walls were covered by tens of thousands of red carnations that, when wilted, revealed the white of the walls, as a reminder of the ephemeral condition of the living. In 1992, coinciding with the Universal Exhibition of Seville, he intervened in the castle of Vélez Blanco, restoring in fabric the spaces left by the stone-by-stone transfer of its Renaissance cloister, sold in 1904 to the United States; it is one of his most poetic proposals and included the brief projection of images of the original construction.
With quick, gestural brushstrokes, and already in the shape of a leaf, Seville would open the 21st century: the series Insomnia was born from an attempt to capture, not the thoughts that run through his head when he can’t sleep, but what’s in his mind before those everyday worries appear. Vibrant accumulations of leaves, in white, black, grey and very occasionally red, contain subtle lights among the darkness; these leaves are here what his lines and modules were in the beginning, also in infinite repetition.
Its following vegetations (Ida, Hotel Triunfo, Valencia Diptych), on surfaces similar to walls, would be much brighter and it is possible to find in them also reminders of the fleeting nature of the plant’s life and its color, as the installation is nothing but a vanitas Time flieswhich contains a clock, a verse by Machado in the same sense (And today is that tomorrow of yesterday) and dozens of butterflies in repeated flight.
Also moving towards their disappearance, among some projects to be recovered, are the drying sheds of the Vega de Granada that inspired his sculptures in metal, paper or neoprene; the plastics of the greenhouses in the area, swayed by the wind, were the germ of the collections New Distant Places and Winter lightsIn these series we will not see brushstrokes, but rather parallel lines made freehand that generate subtle fields of color.
This retrospective culminates with his works based on a small gouache by Sempere, based on lines of ink, graphite or marker, and with a specific installation for the Reina Sofía Museum, which is also the first in which he has used threads in a horizontal arrangement, creating a veil in the architecture: HorizonsShe worked with simple warps, acquired in haberdasheries, in clear allusion to the daily and traditionally feminine act of weaving and the different options of transferring it to the public sphere.
As intellectual as it is sensorial, “Rhythms, plots, variables” is one of the most exciting exhibitions we have seen in recent years at the MNCARS.
Soledad Sevilla. “Rhythms, plots, variables”
NATIONAL MUSEUM REINA SOFIA ART CENTER. MNCARS
C/ Santa Isabel, 52
Madrid
From September 25, 2024 to March 10, 2025
