Last Friday was the opening of “Travesía litoral”, Spanish artist Julio Cabanding’s latest exhibition at PlaticMurs gallery in Valencia, Spain.
Consisting of nine acrylic paintings on disused cardboards, “Travesía litoral” (Spanish for Coastal crossing) takes us on a journey through Anaya Cabanding’s pictorial universe. Reproducing works by classic painters, in this case Spanish masters Joaquín Sorolla, Antonio Muñoz Degrain, Emilio Sala, Ignacio Pinazo, Bernardo Ferrándiz y Badénes and Simonet Lombardo, on non-traditional places and surfaces, the artist unlocks the paintings from the sacralised space of the museum to place them in other places and surfaces In this way, the resulting pieces are not just paintings that pretend to be such in their relationship with the environment, they also generate new meanings by bringing art with capital letters to the streets.
According to the artist, his job is to carry out pictorial interventions in abandoned places. Painting trompe l’oeil paintings, considered works of art of the pictorial tradition and displacing these paintings to inhospitable and decadent places. By leaving the safe and comfortable space of a studio, Julio Anya Cabanding actively searches for abandoned places to inhabit them for short periods of time, a journey of its own, a Spanish travesía.
Julio’s commitment to this unique and poetic art form is sparked by the perception that they are icons of the pictorial tradition and considered works of art that any person, with more or less knowledge of the art world, accepts and identifies as art in capital letters. By combining this pictorial tradition and the rhetoric of the world of graffiti, the artists interventions take place within margins of risk which in many cases have been infamous for creating reactions of rejection that turn his work into a totally ephemeral proposal.
The ephemeral nature of his work makes photography fundamental in the process of his work. This is why the exhibition also consisted of one photograph of large format of a pictorial urban intervention featuring Enrique Simonet’s Decapitation of Saint Paul.
“Travesía Litoral” runs through February 8 at the gallery located on Calle Denia 45, Valencia, Spain
www.julioanayacabanding.com
www.plasticmurs.com
Author: Fran
Founder and editor of Urbanite. Street Art lover who after the finishing her MA thesis on the Mexican and Norwegian muralist movement in the 1920-50s, developed a fascination for street art and graffiti that eventually led to collaborations with different art blogs, including the creation of this one.
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