Valle-Inclán’s Esperpento on display at the Reina Sofía

Madrid. The grotesque, that aesthetic current that disfigured reality as if it were reflected in a concave mirror to ridicule and criticize it with mordacity and irony, was one of the great creative contributions of the Spanish writer and intellectual Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, an iconoclastic Galician who marked Spanish literature and thought of the 20th century. That rhetorical figure, on which a good part of his literary work was inspired, has now become the starting point of a great exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, which with the title Grotesque. Popular art and aesthetic revolutionimmerses itself in those artistic expressions of various genres and authors who mocked both the kitsch of the lighter bourgeoisie and the sinister iconography of the death squads of Nazism and fascism in Europe in the first half of the century. of the last century.

The grotesque was already there when Valle-Inclán discovered it or redefined it, because that way of laughing at power and barbarism, at abuse and opulence, was very much alive in popular culture. But not only that of the 20th century, but it is part of the country’s own idiosyncrasy. In fact, Valle-Inclán himself, in one of his masterpieces, Bohemian lightswhich is also one of the fundamental texts to understand the amazing as an aesthetic current, he stated: The ultraists are fakes. Goya invented esperpentism. The classic heroes have gone for a walk in Cat’s Alley.

With that idea as its axis, that of the grotesque as a popular tool for criticism and humor, the Reina Sofía museum exhibits one of the great exhibitions of the year for this art center, especially for the in-depth research and recovery of pieces and objects of popular art – such as masks, vignettes, posters, puppets or illustrations – that allow us to understand the rhetorical dimension of the aesthetic figure of the grotesque, beyond the two or three most popular literary references.

The exhibition begins with a mirror with the heads of two painted donkeys and the legend There are already three of us!a work from 1900 by Joaquín Xaudaró y Echau. Follow the journey through what could be called the background of the grotesque through satirical caricatures that animalized politicians and the monarchy, paintings in the tradition of Goya or optical devices prior to cinema. Organized through eight sections, the exhibition itinerary starts from the first third of the 20th century, from the author’s native Galicia, until his death and the first months of the Civil War (1936-1939).

The curator of the exhibition, Germán Labrador, explained during the presentation to the media that the idea is remove the grotesque from the corner of literary curiosity, the strange knick-knacks or the traditionalist tradition where the Franco regime tried to corner it and place it as what it is, a critical, aesthetic, profound category.

One of the tools that also served as inspiration for Valle-Inclán to write and see reality from that concave mirror of the grotesque were puppets. He himself recognized it: “I am doing something new, different from my previous works. Now I write for dolls. It is something that I have created and that I title Snakes. This theater cannot be represented by actors, but by dolls, in the manner of the Teatro dei Piccoli in Italy.”

The exhibition delves into the idea that nonsense, deformation and all the imagery that underlies the popular imagination transcends what is a literary genre to become a way of understanding reality through critical distancing. To illustrate Valle-Inclán’s vision of the world, paintings by contemporary painters of the writer such as José Gutiérrez-Solana, María Blanchard, Eugenio Lucas Velázquez, Rosario de Velasco or Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao are rescued, as well as international artists such as Umberto Boccioni, André Masson or Caspar Neher. José Clemente Orozco, with his work Tiranois one of the most important pieces in the exhibition.

The exhibition remains open to the public in Madrid until March 10 of next year.