Confined
Representational art in quarantine, the MEAM’s online exhibition.
Art is the expression of a feeling, and therefore studying art as an intimate and natural activity of the human being allows us not only to contemplate but to describe and transmit the essence of society. If we want to understand a society, we must study the art of its time. If we want to understand the present, we must focus on feelings. Let us focus for a few minutes on those feelings to which, as human beings, we have been subjected these last few days confined at home. If we look at the works of art that have been made lately, we will be able to see what today’s art describes to us and what feelings artists express about the circumstance that characterizes our current society.
One of the purposes of art is to show us the man as he is, how he lives, what he feels, what he dreams, etc. Many, seeing us locked up at home, have tested our limits and our strengths and we could not help but feel uncertainty, anxiety, fear, loneliness, and concern. Just as art is an expression of feelings, whether of anguish, pain, beauty or passion, figurative art in particular, as an artistic language, facilitates the transmission and expression of these feelings, making the viewer see himself reflected in the works many times. Thanks to its realistic language, it immerses us in scenes that we understand and assimilate. We recall a fragment of the MEAM — European Museum of Modern Art — «Manifesto»:
The fact is that art must be easily assimilated by the spectator; it must be capable of speaking their language, of producing hope in them, of arousing admiration, of opening the box of dreams. Art must be aimed at the man in the street, not at the learned or the specialist. Art must speak the language of the people, not that of the academics. Art that no longer conforms with experimentation turned into an end in itself, nor with the permanent essay of forms and colours without achieving any definitive product, nor with the worship of noise for noise’s sake, nor with the manufacture of film montages condemned to boredom. And this new expression once again requires a direct, express, rounded, total, real, intelligible and brilliant art, capable of generating hopes and arousing admiration in wide sectors of the population who, in this way, will make their peace with the art of their time again and dream with hopes that are today completely forgotten. The intellectual can write interesting essays about the essence of art, but the artist does not live from these essays. The academics can applaud already consecrated artists, but this is not going to guarantee them in any way the ability to survive in their time. The only thing that gives meaning to art is its capacity to connect with the people, of reaching people of its same historical moment in time, of reaching the sensitivity of an average spectator and seducing them. And the fact is that to do that we do not need qualifications and diplomas. It is enough to know how to create.
For this reason, we have compiled a set of paintings by international figurative artists and, which in most cases, we have been able to see at the MEAM, either in monographic exhibitions, or in painting and sculpture competitions, such as «Figurativas», called biannually by the Arts and Artists Foundation, or «ModPortrait», convened annually by the Artelibre Gallery in Zaragoza.
It is a series of works that describe everyday scenes, our daily activities, the empty streets, the windows through which our desires and longings sneak in, the balconies to which we go out to applaud our heroes, the corners that we live, in those who dream, in those who feel less alone, in those who reflect, observe and feel.
Works that describe that frustrated attempt to fill a void, to see them and realize it, or on the contrary, to flee and abstract from the reality that surrounds us and wait anxiously for this to end soon in order to return to that ‘normality’, to the bubble in which we have resigned ourselves to live and in which we feel safe because perhaps it guarantees us that every morning will be a new day.
