Known essentially for his surreal stagings, Bob Wilson had yet to debut in Barcelona as a graphic artist. Which is strange, because in the genesis of his work there are drawings that, as in the case of The Messiah, often hide the emotion of the music that he sits down to listen to, charcoal in hand, and that exude three-dimensionality, light and vertigo. emotional.
“When I was seven years old, my mother said… ‘Bob thinks by drawing.’” The Texan artist explains it in the Senda Gallery, the exhibition space that has the privilege of hosting 41 of the 60 charcoals on paper that he made in 2020 to premiere in Salzburg this Mozartian version of Händel’s oratorio that has now arrived at the Liceu. Carlos Duran, the gallery owner, confesses that he had been trying to bring video portraits of him to the Loop for 7 and 8 years, but “he was always very shielded and busy.” “Without the Liceu behind it, this exhibition would have been impossible,” he says.
In these series, the visitor identifies the logs hanging from the Liceu stage, or the cracking icebergs projected during the climax of Hallelujah, or even the lighting exercise that reflects a vertical series of small drawings, on sale for 20,000 euros.
The Fòrum de les Cultures did produce an exhibition 20 years ago that put its models in dialogue with the pre-Columbian art of Barbier-Mueller, recalls Isa Casanellas. But now there is the possibility of delving into the vision of a 360º artist who starts from an origin that has very little intellectual, according to the artist. “If I think about it too much, I prevent the piece from expressing itself. Even today, at 82 years old, I don’t know how to start, but you have to start from something and, like in chess, one move leads to another.”
“I’m still interested in classical structure,” he continues in what ends up being a philosophical lesson. He was shocked, he remembers, as an architecture student, by the exercise that Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s wife gave them: “they have three minutes to design a city.” He imagined an apple with a cube inside… Thus, the first thing he decided about Einstein on the beach was the structure, before even knowing the context: it would have four acts and last five hours… “My job is to make decisions in time space”.
