“I have always been much more worried about the wrinkles on my brain than those on my face,” she says confidently in a “glorious” moment of her life because, she points out, “when you grow up you solve many things that get in your way with yourself.” ”. Lita Cabellut presents her first exhibition in Madrid and she does so in an art gallery and with a celebration of spring, light and life. It is The Girl in the Gaze (Mysterious Initiations of Painting by Lita Cabellut), 18 medium and large format portraits that will be seen until June 8 at the Opera Gallery inspired by the Mayan festival of Colmenar Viejo, which she discovered a few years ago. years and that since pagan times has celebrated the rebirth of the earth with children dressed in flowers.
Cabellut (Sariñena, Huesca, 1961), who has lived in The Hague for decades and is internationally successful, says that these paintings have been the perfect, luminous counterweight to the other great project that he has faced in parallel: his look at the very difficult Goya’s Nonsense, which will be seen at the end of the year at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando.
“The series that I am exhibiting now in Madrid is born – he says – from a desire to share light and positivity, color, in these moments that we are crossing in history, with one bad news after another and where the catastrophes are taking on an immensity that seems that affects us a lot, but also too little. What is happening in the world is producing in us an anesthesia of joy, an anesthesia of future perspective, an anesthesia of power. And that is very bad for the soul, for the body, for living. With this series, all I do is share beauty and tenderness, and above all, the future. Because all the characters are children. And through children I want to represent the pillar of our society,” he emphasizes.
Cabellut says that he did not know about the Maya de Colmenar festival until a few years ago. “In a magazine I found a couple of very small photographs, a very small article, which said that it started with a pagan festival, then they banned it in the Inquisition, but that they never finished putting it out. And it seemed wonderful to me to reclaim the celebration of spring, the celebration of good news, an offering to what is most necessary for humanity, our environment, nature, the earth.”
Working on these paintings with children has been, he says, “wonderful, they come dressed as they are used to their parents dressing them and they have to get rid of that, they have to put on other clothes, I paint them, I put paint on their hands, their feet, I put them in the clothes I created for them, I fix their hair, I glue their hair with paint… and they love it. Because children have no prejudices, when they feel safe and in a magical world, they flourish, they open up, they transform. One said: I feel like a prince. The other said: I feel like a fairy. The other one said, I’m a butterfly, right? It’s nice to see how they transformed into what they wanted. When I work with adults, I have to prepare them. Tell them now I’m going to pour paint on you, it has a temperature, don’t worry, this paint doesn’t sting, it’s children’s paint, you could even eat it. But when you start painting them, they tense their bodies, try to close their eyes… the children received it like caresses. Is awesome”.
Faced with this vital series, he is working on a “totally opposite” one for the Royal Academy of San Fernando about Goya’s Nonsense. “The series about the Mayan festival has not only been necessary to bring good news, but also so that it could maintain the days and hours, sometimes very conflictive, representing the Nonsense. Nonsense has no color. It is a bath of reality, of brutality. “I magnify them with a magnifying glass to refresh our memory,” she points out. And he assures that he has had to separate his workshops into two: “One was hope and color, where I recovered there, I was cured there, and then I returned to my Nonsense.”
And remember that “Goya’s Disparates were the last testimony he gave on the plates. Then he emigrated, he left. I think he could no longer witness what he is talking about and left it to us on the plates, in the works. We are talking about forced marriages, about rape, about domestic aggression, about aggression towards those who are different, towards the weak, towards those born with some physical deformation, about power, about the blind in politics who are the ones who guide the lost people, about the church, about gratuitous violence, about how an ignorant, foolish, charlatan, is the buffoon and is the one who is listened to…” And he believes that our nonsense and that of Goya’s times are comparable. “I think we are passing, as a society, a very important ethics exam. We have to assess what ethics figure we are going to have.”
And he points out, he says, that he had to face such hard issues “because it is the moment we are living in and because as an artist I believe that I have the responsibility to share and express what worries me, what matters to me, what occupies me. And it is humanity.”
Of course, personally, he acknowledges, “I am in a glorious moment. Glorious because when you grow up you solve many things that get in the way with yourself. And also, at the same time, because my family is healthy, they are happy. I’m going to be a grandmother, I’m a grandmother and I’m going to be a grandmother. I am privileged to be geographically where I am, surrounded by the people I am. When I go into my studio and I have my team and I can work on what I feel, it is a very great privilege. Personally, I am very happy.”
And the artistic field, he assures, “goes together, because I think that now, after 50 years painting, technique is no longer something main in my life. It has become part of my hand, part of my feet, of my shoulders, of my movement. And I don’t have to control it anymore. Now the technique is even available to be able to unlearn everything I have learned. I didn’t expect that growing up and getting older would have so many good advantages. Growing up doesn’t have good press. But every year I am perhaps closer to understanding what art is. And this only comes with age. I have always been much more worried about the wrinkles on my brain than on my face. And the only thing I want is to have the mobility to be able to move freely from my studio.”
