“Alicante has to reconsider the Official, it has a great artist but a lousy monument. The jury has to think about it.” These statements made to the newspaper Información by José Francisco Gómez Fonseca have caused the indignation of the Hogueras artists’ union, which in response has recalled that Fonseca was sanctioned after his breaches in the last Fallas de València.
In a statement, the guild explains that “once the last Fallas of March 2023 ended, and in light of the incidents that occurred in them, which we deeply regret, this guild met to implement the internal incident regime discipline that our internal statutes collect”.
As a result of this position, the statement continues, “the artists José Francisco Gómez Fonseca and Roberto Chorro Torregrosa caused voluntary withdrawal from the Guild, thus losing their status as members. Until today, no communication had been made in this regard for not to harm them in the processes of construction and plantà of the bonfires”.
The union members assure that “they will never make statements like those made by Mr. José Francisco Gómez discrediting a colleague or his work”, and they “vigorously” condemn said statements. The artists consider “absolutely deplorable and unprofessional that negative manifestations take place in public against the work of any colleague.”
This controversy is added to the one caused by the tiebreaker in the Special category that gave victory to Diputació-Renfe. The Florida-Portazgo commission alleges that the statutes that indicate that in the event of a tie, only the president and the secretary of the jury should know the result of the vote to determine the winner.
The statutes say that “in the event of a tie persisting, the casting vote of the president will decide. None of the members of the jury will know the result and order of the winners, with the exception of the secretary and president, who have obligation to keep secret until the result of the vote is publicly announced by the Mayor.
In this case, once the first tie was produced and after the second vote between the two monuments that obtained the same score, it transcended the rest of the jury, who decided to remove the president for also being one of the Bonfires involved. In Florida they think that, since they had broken the statutes and committed this irregularity, which the president described at the time as a “coup d’état”, it would have been fairer to divide the prize between the two, declare an award ex-aequo, despite the fact that the rule excludes that option.
Fonseca’s is not the only “skid” that an artist has committed at parties in which he has highlighted the high level of the monuments. The Association of Friends of Ukraine, which has thanked “all the people of Alicante for their support and solidarity with Ukraine, which, another year since the Russian invasion, has been present in the actions, minds and hearts of the majority of the Commissions”, He has seen with disgust “the work of the brilliant artist and good friend of our cause, Pere Baenas, and his creation, the Florida Portazgo bonfire.” The reason? That in the ‘Vents’ bonfire matryoshkas (a set of traditional Russian dolls) were exposed, decorated with Russian and Ukrainian flags and with images of Russia and the countries that support Ukraine.
In a statement, the association points out that “it is clear that the will of the author represents his desire for peace to come but his work, despite its beauty and intention, portrays us together with a terrorist country that destroys our nation and those who They live in it.”
The Ukrainians residing in Alicante point out that “Russia is considered toxic among the democracies of the world and among an overwhelming majority of international organizations for its contempt for human rights, international legality and world peace and for this reason it is the object of condemnation by Nations Nations that reach unprecedented levels of unanimity. The President of Russia, the highest authority of his State, has an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for nothing less than the illegal deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia.”
