Expositions

LAS PROVINCIAS

Saturday, May 8 2010, 02:56

Vicente Castellano Giner (Valencia, born in Quart Street in 1927) is well known and admired by his colleagues, but not by the general public, due to extra-cultural reasons. Perhaps he is due to the artist's way of being, little friend of exhibitionism or truculent statements. Perhaps because he lived in France for 22 years (1955-1977) and that distanced him from influential centers of decision. In any case, his work has not been exposed among us with the attention it deserves. 'Vincent Castilian. Paintings. Anthological exhibition', inaugurated yesterday at the Chirivella-Soriano Foundation with the collaboration and sponsorship of the Consortium of Museums, breaks that inexplicable oblivion and makes things very clear: the great painter, who in his youth was part of several groups renovating a plastic stagnant local (Los Siete, Parpalló, Arte Actual.), deserves the same high artistic consideration that other outstanding figures of his generation do have (Michavila, Alfaro, Sempere, Hernández-Mompó.). The anthology is made up of 105 works that go from 1947, with his academic work at the Valencia School of Fine Arts (where he was a student of Salvador Tuset), until 2009.

One day before Felipe Garín (advisor to the Museum Consortium), Juan Ángel Blasco Carrascosa (exhibition curator) and Manuel Chirivella (president of the Foundation) presented the anthology yesterday at the Palau Joan de Valeriola, I had the pleasure of visiting quietly displays it with the artist himself. "You have to be crazy and a poet to dedicate yourself body and soul to painting," says Castellano, who is in magnificent shape at almost 83 years of age. "The artist makes a subjective interpretation of his reality, and in my case he has been spiritual and profound, inviting the viewer to participate in it," he says as we climb the stairs of the restored Velluters palace. «When I arrived in Paris in 1955, the shock with reality that I left behind was tremendous, suddenly I had everything I needed to develop». He gradually stopped painting figuratively and moved on to abstract painting. Some friends did not understand this evolution: «Vicente, with how well you painted before, and now the Parisian virus has entered you», they told him. His father "always defended me." After contemplating his first works, among them an interior on Calle Alta in which a woman is seen embroidering fans (“that painting won a medal at the SEU”), we come to his first abstract attempts. “Paris is already noticeable here!” He exclaims. Castilian, he met Eusebio Sempere and Lucío Muñoz at the College d'Espagne, with whom he became close friends, and lived through the exciting years of the 'nouvelle vague', the polemics of Camus ("a great writer, an admirable thinker" ) with Sartre ("who was more political") and the stormy eruption of May 68 ("the banks were closed for a week or more, and I didn't even have money to buy food, my friends had to help me") .

Every year, Vicente returned to Valencia for a few days. Theirs was a diaspora, not an exile. «My vacations were paid for with some paintings that I took to the Braulio gallery, and Mrs. Braulio told me 'let's see what you've painted in Paris', and she bought everything for me». In those years he exhibited in Brussels to an enthusiastic reception (“it seems unbelievable that an artist who comes from Franco's Spain could be so modern”, wrote a critic), while in his country he could not exhibit or did so only in group shows. At the age of 50, Castellano definitively returned to an already democratic Valencia, and from 1981 to 1994 he taught as a professor in the Department of Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts.

The tour of the rooms (his admirable works from the black and white periods, and the surprising 'Bodegó cendrer', 'Paisatge cendrer', 'Objecte cendrer' and 'Alexandría cendrer' from the 1960s, of extraordinary modernity) ends with 'La color box. La boite tressée' of 2009, "with an explosion of color that is a metaphor for my life because it expresses all my feelings: love, pain, joy, death." An exhibition that reveals the many ignorances that we still have in the field of our own artistic history.