Floods of Reason in an Era of Change for Spain In the Spain of the 1970s there was a move towards ‘schizoid’ approaches to reality, using figurative tools. Rather than being a return to the past, this painting style represented the cry of a generation that had grown up in urban surroundings (the rural exodus generation) which was searching, from the perspective of a clear sense of rootlessness, for some answers in changing times defined by the slow-motion collapse of a dictatorship, and a burning anxiety to build new personal liberties. outside the limits of “normality.” In his series Taco (made up over four hundred pieces of poster board that he began working on in 1974), he transforms the painting of objects into a representation of concepts with which to reflect on the condition of painting. New acquisitions Carlos Alcolea. Finisterre, 1988-89
Although this generation has always been identified with the group known as Los Esquizos de Madrid (The Madrid Schizos), the phenomenon actually took root at the same time in a number of different geographical locations. Part of the current known as Nueva Figuración Madrileña, they gave new impetus to figurative painting, proposing an original way of looking at the traditional narrative genre, and incorporating ingredients from mass culture, surrealism and psychoanalysis. Some of these young people reveal an influence by Luis Gordillo’s ideas that painting is an ongoing psychoanalytic process, both in terms of the creative mechanism and in terms of the therapeutic value of engaging in artistic activity. The works of Carlos Alcolea (1949-1992) and Chema Cobo (1952) are of deformed, split characters that sometimes are literally broken. The work of Carlos Franco (1951) from the second half of the 1970s, particularly O mago do carnaval (1977), also decomposes, to an even greater extent (if possible), the forms and figures, while intensifying colour with impossible chromatic contrasts. Also arising within this context is the work of Manolo Quejido (1946), in which the vitalist liberation of painting appears as a form of resistance to the age-old reclusion of everything
Manolo Quejido. Máquina sentada en silla, 1978-79 Manolo Quejido. Cerillo (Cosas), 1976
Bibliography AA. VV. Los Esquizos de Madrid. Figuración madrileña de los ’70 [cat.], Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2009. AA. VV. Manolo Quejido. Pintura en acción [cat.], Sevilla: Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, 2006. Comelles, Josep Maria. “Psiquiatras, locos y salud mental en la Transición”, en AA. VV. En Transición [cat.], Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 2008. Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix. El Anti-Edipo: capitalismo y esquizofrenia, Barcelona: Paidós, 1998.
NIPO 036-14-019-5
Schizophrenia was the definition given to the thread that connected these artists together, not in the medical sense, but rather as an attitude towards reality. The ‘split mind’ of the artist and of society runs through the whole period: different voices speak through one individual while various trends and events are changing the surroundings. As with mental illness, the artist lives in the gap between what his desire’s voice of tells him and what reality demands; the lack of sexual freedom and freedom of expression, of assembly, of movement gave rise to new underground urban cultures connected to nightlife, excess, the growth of progressive rock, psychedelia and drug use: the other world that these artists were documenting and feeding from.
Chema Cobo. Study of Two Pears, 1978-79