A woman with a child in her arms is the image that presides over the apse of the Basilica of Santa Maria del Pi in Barcelona, ??next to the Rambla. Is it a maternity? Not very well, because the child is not a baby and the mother does not nurse him. Nor is she a mother-god in majesty, for the woman does not sit on a throne nor does the child, sitting on her lap, look forward. Nor is it a pity, although the boy, who appears to be asleep or faint, might be dead, but he is too young. According to tradition, Jesus was 33 years old when he died on the cross.
So what does this 14 meter high and 10 meter wide canvas represent, which has been installed behind the image of Our Lady of the Pi and which will be there until Christmas? It’s called Criança, and the author, Aryz, refers: “Formally it’s a mother with a child, and then everyone has to make the image their own. Love is a universal value: it is a mother who accompanies the child until he fends for himself, hence the name Criança”. At one point in the conversation with La Vanguardia, the artist points out: “It can also be a truncated motherhood”. Aryz is the stage name of Octavi Serra Arrizabalaga, urban artist from Cardedeu, born 35 years ago.
“The initial proposal starts from a list of values ??inherent in the basilica that the people of El Pi sent me – explains the artist-. I am not a religious person, but these values ??are universal. Let’s talk about friendship, generosity, otherness, which is accepting the other’s opinion and considering it valid… Maybe these are not values ??that are in the DNA of human beings, but they are they should be in the DNA of society”.
“The people of the basilica wanted us to do something,” he continues. They opened their doors wide open to me, and were open to everything I proposed. The altar is the place where a piece shines the most and since I come from the mural, which dialogues with the environment, here you enter a space that is a wonder, with many elements to dialogue with. And the first proposal, which was a sketch of what we see now, was already accepted.”
In this dialogue, Aryz recalls that in the place now occupied by Criança there was an altarpiece that disappeared in 1714. “Only the godmother who now presides over the basilica survived. This godmother was in dialogue with that altarpiece, which we don’t know what it was like because there are no records, and now she is in dialogue with this piece, and that is magical.”
The monumental piece was painted on a canvas in the workshop of the Germans Castells, the historic scenographers of Cardedeu, and in the basilica it has been mounted on a wooden scaffolding. Yesterday, at the inauguration, it was planned that, while the rector blessed it, Raül Refree would improvise a piece on the organ.
But how does Aryz get this assignment? First there were the graffiti, which appeared on the external walls of the thousand-year-old stones of the church of El Pi. But when some of these artistic interventions ended up damaging the heritage of this Gothic basilica, Jordi Sacasas, who is the conservative archivist of the Pi, decided to turn the tide: “We denounced the fact as a one-off thing, because it was an attack against the Pi church, which is a cultural asset of national interest (BCIN), but what we didn’t want was to condemn the whole group, because the controversy criminalized the urban art Then it seemed interesting to us to enter into discourse with this whole world. I discovered in an interview that Xavier Ballaz, from B-Murals, expressed values ??very similar to our way of thinking and I contacted him.”
The Basilica of the Pi, therefore, proposes to B-Murals to make “a regulated intervention of urban art, as has been done in Germany, for example, in the church of Sant Pere de Colònia, which is a benchmark for us , because since the 1980s he has been speaking about the pastoral care of the Church with contemporary art”, explains Sacasas. It should be added that the Basilica of Pi has always been characterized by going beyond the liturgy. “From the 17th century, when there was already a social awareness of participation with citizens, until the immigration ban of 2001, there has always been an interest in opening up to people, especially to the most marginalized groups; and there is also a cultural will, with the recovery of the musical background that goes back to 1140. In other words, different paths so that everything converges in the pastoral event”.
And B-Murals entrusts the intervention to Aryz. It is not the first time that the artist, who has work halfway around the world, intervenes in a temple. He already did it in Rouen, in Bologna, in Paris… But on this occasion, due to the fact that it was a church in Barcelona, ??he considered that money should not be an impediment. “The project was stuck due to financing, but I thought it was something that had to happen, that it is a project out of a thousand, because it had never happened in Barcelona, ??and that’s why I ended up putting the money I got into it with the sale of work”. Aryz has done it for the love of art, another universal value.
