Huesca,
An unfinished poem by Hölderlin dedicated to the Titaness Mnemosyne, who in Greek mythology personified memory (The time is long / however it happens / the true), and Aby Warburg’s Atlas, which also bears her name and which proposed a network of relationships, never definitive, between two thousand images, have been the two starting points of curator Chus Tudelilla when launching the exhibition and the editorial project that delve into the temporalities that house the collections of the Provincial Council of Huesca. Also paying attention to the theories of Giorgio Agamben according to which the contemporary cannot be understood except in its confrontation with the past, contemplated from a certain anachronism, this proposal, titled precisely “Long is time”, outlines links between works belonging to eras and different languages, based on those famous elective affinitiescomplex because they link, even intimately, that which never shared space.
The exhibition is structured into half a dozen sections (On stage, Horizons, Landscapes, Identities, Decline of the sacred and this poor body), but they are not presented as watertight compartments, rather the viewer is encouraged to imagine alternative relationships between their pieces and their own stories based on each one of them, insisting that each new observation may give rise to new fruits. The works included in the tour correspond both to the historical collection of the Provincial Council – mostly religious paintings and instruments and tools for measuring nature – as well as more recent acquisitions from national or international artists who have been part of its exhibition programming or that of the CDAN or that have been beneficiaries of the Ramón Acín and Antonio Saura calls for artistic creation and research.
The exhibition begins with works by Joan Brossa and José Noguero, the first (Departure1989), clearly directed to the viewer as the subject of play and the artist’s interlocutor; the second, Blue (2008), with an evident scenographic sense. They represent a kind of backstage of this collection and advance the curator’s approaches: the works that we can see represent a representation conceived for the public, who will activate with their presence the fiction that is proposed and will be able to become aware of the renewed dimension time that these compositions will assume when they come into contact with each other and with the present moment.
Next, and without detaching from this accentuation of time, the exhibition pays attention to the horizon lines that run through the landscapes, horizons that are impossible to reach and that here come to emphasize that the unpredictable never appears on maps or plans and that granting visible traces The invisible is a human resource to maintain a certain control over nature and its representation. Regarding the delimitation of the physical, we will contemplate, in addition to different precision instruments dated to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, works on our analytical treatment of geography and its accidents by Gema Rupérez, Eduardo Marco Miranda and Enrique Larroy. .
The third chapter, as we said, focuses on landscape, which a Council of Europe meeting held in Florence in 2000 defined as any part of the territory as perceived by the population, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors. The meetings to reach this and other consensuses on its protection, management and planning had begun before, in the nineties, at the same time that the Huesca Provincial Council embarked on a program of exhibitions, activities and publications around this matter that would culminate with the opening of the CDAN, the Art and Nature Center. In this case, together with compasses and a clisimeter, we will see projects by Sergio Belinchón, Miguel Ángel Blanco, Enrique Carbó, Alberto Carneiro, David Nash, Bleda y Rosa, Javier Broto, Diego del Pozo, Fernando Biarge, Iñaki Bergera, Siah Armajani, Teresa Salcedo, Ricardo Calero, Rebecca Mutell or Sara Álvarez Serrat.
Below we will meet the photographs of Ricardo Compairé which, in the early stages of the 20th century, testified to a renewed interest on the part of the people of Huesca to get to know their territory better, an interest promoted since 1912 by the Tourism Society of Alto Aragón, and which In turn, they were the seed of the collection of the Photo Library dependent on the Provincial Council. World War I implied a certain decline in this trend, but in the twenties Ramón Acín and Compairé himself (who would be president of that organization since 1934) once again promoted the possibilities of photography in the study of the Huesca environment; In the words of the second, Photography is the only way to stop time. Behind me, other photographers with better means will be able to photograph the same landscapes, which will still be there. But of the characters, their costumes and utensils, only my portraits will remain. We owe Compairé, by the way, the images of numerous works by Acín and those of the first busts of José María Aventín that endorsed his work before the Provincial Council when he requested a student pension.
That legacy would be part of the imagination of Antonio Saura, of which the mural painting is exhibited here Elegywhose greens inevitably evoke those of the city landscape. This collective closes with two sections linked to spirituality: The decline of the sacred invites the viewer to scrutinize a past in which faith had permanent validity and presence, based on representations of the Virgin and saints dated between the 16th and 18th centuries (in the case of those in which the date is recorded) and works by Pedro Avellaned, Antonio Lachos and Ouka Leele; and this poor body It delves into the origin of man and the violence and evil that cannot be separated from human history. The Provincial Council shows us Iberian daggers, paintings of Santo Domingo del Val and the death of Lucrecia of unknown authorship and creations by the aforementioned Saura and Avellaned, in addition to those by María Cruz Sarvisé, Javier Codesal and Gerardo Montiel.
As always, educational activities have been scheduled for all audiences: guided tours for educational centers, individual audiences, organized groups or visitors with special needs.
“Long is the time in the Art Collection of the Provincial Council of Huesca”
EXHIBITION ROOM OF THE DIPUTATION OF HUESCA
C/ Porches de Galicia, 4
Huesca
From November 29, 2024 to February 16, 2025
