JoaquÃn Sorolla is considered the painter of light, the artist who surely best captured the intensity of the sun and its effects on people and objects. But Sorolla also mastered the use of black like few others, of dark tones, those that best defined the profiles of his portraits. This quality can be perceived since yesterday in the ambitious selection of works exhibited by the Bancaja de València Foundation, carried out in collaboration with the Sorolla Museum and the Sorolla Museum Foundation.
The exhibition, which was presented yesterday, reveals the notorious presence of black in Sorolla’s painting throughout his career and provides another point of view to understand and appreciate the artist in all his complexity. The exhibition brings together a hundred works by Sorolla, some of which were exhibited at the Sorolla Museum in Madrid in 2022, now being presented in Valencia in an expanded form with works that are exhibited to the public for the first time in this exhibition and many of them are being exhibited for the first time in Valencia.
The presentation was attended by the president of the Bancaja Foundation, Rafael Alcón; the director of the Sorolla Museum, Enrique Varela; and the curator of the exhibition, Carlos Reyero; as well as the assistance of the expert in the work of the painter and patron of the Bancaja Foundation, Blanca Pons-Sorolla; and the president of the Permanent Commission of the Sorolla Museum Foundation, Antonio Mollá.
The works come from a wide range of public and private institutions such as the Sorolla Museum, the Sorolla Museum Foundation, the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, the Segovia Museum, the Malaga Museum, the Sorigué Foundation, the Santander Bank Foundation, and the Murcia Museum of Fine Arts. , Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia, BBVA Collection, Zaragoza Museum, IVAM, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Palacio de Viana. Caja Sur Córdoba Foundation, CaixaBank Collection and Ana Chiclana Gallery, to which are added works from the Bancaja Foundation and twenty private collections.
Along with the canvases, dated between 1887 and 1920, other artistic and documentary materials are exhibited, such as photographs, color notes, an album of Japanese prints and a palette of the painter.
The use of black in Sorolla stems from the Spanish pictorial tradition – from his knowledge of Velázquez, El Greco or Goya – to become an element of expressiveness, suggest poetic and emotional states, and be reinterpreted as a color that translates the modernity of his time. and its sober elegance.
The exhibition is structured in four sections: ‘Harmony in black and grey’; ‘Symbolic black’; ‘Black and dark surfaces’; and ‘Monochromies’. The tour begins with the chromatic chords of black and gray in portraits that give his painting a particular personality, and continues with the symbolism and cultural significance of the color black that permeates the time and the work of the naturalist painter.
The exhibition tour analyzes the new use of black, which took shape in the 19th century as a creator of radical contrasts and an enhancer of other colors. The exhibition ends with the monochromes, scenes wrapped in grayish or bluish tones, which, far from implying less complexity, imply a singular exercise in technical virtuosity.
The exhibition is the result of an investigation that delves not only into the study of Sorolla’s painting and the meaning of dark tones in his poetics, but also into the aesthetic and cultural value of blacks and grays in painting between the centuries.
Sorolla in black is part of the official program for the commemoration in 2023 of the centenary of the death of JoaquÃn Sorolla, and with this exhibition the Bancaja Foundation begins its programming within the framework of the Sorolla Year, declared an Event of Exceptional Public Interest, and in the year in which which also takes place the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the new Bancaja Foundation.
Coinciding with the exhibition, a catalog has been published that includes the reproduction of the exhibited works accompanied by texts by the curator Carlos Reyero, Estrella de Diego and Isabel Cúa. Within the cultural and artistic mediation program, the Bancaja Foundation will offer free educational workshops linked to the exhibition and aimed at schoolchildren, people with functional diversity and people at risk of social exclusion, as well as guided tours for the general public and groups led by an expert specialist in art and cultural mediation.
The Sorolla in Black exhibition can be visited at the Bancaja Foundation headquarters in Valencia (Plaza Tetuán, 23) from May 5 to September 10, 2023.
