The Esteban Vicente Museum of Contemporary Art presents Alberto Corazón. The Furtive Hunter. This exhibition has been produced by Roberto Polo Collection. Center of Modern and Contemporay Art in Castilla-La Mancha (CORPO). The curators are his Artistc Director, Rafael Sierra, and the wife and professional partner of Alberto Corazón, Ana Arambarri.
After passing through Casa Zavala, Cuenca; Lonja del Pescado, Alicante; and La Rioja Parlament, Logroño; the Esteban Vicente Musem of Contemporary Art receives this travelling exhibition with an increase in their works selection. These works raise a wink between some pieces by Corazón and the drawings, collages and toys by Esteban Vicente.
The exhibition unveils the artist’s creative process through 89 pieces, several of which had never been on display before. The works are organised around Corazón’s key themes, and at the same time, proposes a journey that has a great deal to do with the recovery of memory. Alberto Corazón was an impulsive artist, who felt the urge to express the whirlwind of ideas sprouting from his brain in forms and words, one would assume that ordering emotion was no easy tasks. Nonetheless, his inescapably captivating writings –presents in the exhibition- are the best guide for exploring the paths of his emotions and memories. “I have never been tempted to paint what I see. I must wait for the images to return from somewhere in memory”.
Alberto Corazón. The Furtive Hunter, a title that pays tribute to theories about “the image as a way of thinking” and “useful art”, which he set out in several essays. Corazón was a total artist who was able to express himself in an interdisciplinary manner. And this is precisely what the show, a journey through his creative souls.
As an introduction, six paintings and an installation show to us THE ARTIST´S TABLE, his table designs, outlining his unmethodical personality. The place where Alberto Corazon travelled daily between painting, graphic design, sculpture and writing, always chasing unanswered essential questions, cabals about the meaning of life.
Since 1997, the artist cultivates the STIL LIFE genre because of the presence of the objecthood. This genre allows him to think about the painting, the representation and the perception. “My still lifes are purely symbolic, in their specific composition strategy I find a territory of infinite aesthetic freedom”. Highlights in this section Corazón´s versions and reworking of Caravaggio´s Basket of Fruit.
A selection of RELIEFS and SCULPTURES, between 1995 and 1997, show us the develop of his sculpture work in an abstract and symbolic language in different materials as lead, steel, aluminum and bronze.
ORE CLIFFS, GULLIES, AND WHARFS are stone walls painted from the sea in front of the Agua Amarga Coast, in the Natural Park of Gata´s Cape, Almería. This area is like a “moon landscape” in which Alberto Corazón lost the space notion.
They are delicate pieces that analyse the landscape from a synthetic vision, resolved with spontaneous drawing strokes, close to impressionist virgules, and with trembling calligraphies, which are intermingled, on occasions, with small masses of color.
In SAND GARDEN series of canvases, the central motif is an abstract, resounding and recurring form of two leaves inside a container, synthesized to the extreme, emerging on a field of uniform color, while in the group of works that make up the NIGHT GARDEN series, highlighting the forests in which the shapes float distributed over the entire surface of the canvas, isolated from each other, highlighting their objectivity.
Alberto Corazón painted frenetically, often switching from one painting –at times left unfinished, although his strokes always had a purpose- to another that appealed more strongly to his imagination at that particular moment.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
The graphic work of Alberto Corazón was inseparable from his other creative talents: painting, sculpting and writing. His first exhibition was held towards the end of 1971 at the Galería Redor in Madrid, under the auspicious title Reading the Image. In 1976 he took part in the off-Venice show Spain. The Artistic Avant-garde and Social Reality (1936-1976), an alternative at that year’s Biennale to the Spanish pavilion, which had been closed down as a gesture of the art world’s condemnation of the Burgos Trials. Corazón contributed with conceptual art pieces and was an active curator together with Tàpies, Saura, Equipo Crónica and others. The artist’s first book-length essay, La década prodigiosa [The Prodigious Decade], also came out in 1976. In the course of his career this would be followed by another nine books, most of them devoted to the concept of “images as a form of thought” and his theory of “useful art”. From the 1980s on, his work was exhibited in Spain and abroad by the Marlborough gallery.
In 2006 he was elected member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, where he gave an acceptance speech entitled “Palabra e icono: signos” [Word and Icon: Signs]. In 2008 the IVAM put on an anthological retrospective of his work. The show later travelled to Hanoi and Shanghai, and was followed by similar exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Madrid and the Fundación Telefónica. A new retrospective, held in 2013 at the Fundación Murcia Futuro, went on to visit different cities in Spain.
