Martí Domínguez has won the III Humanistic Essay Good Letters award, endowed with 6,000 euros, with the work Del natural, which Edicions 62 will publish in October. In the book, the writer traces a journey through the history of painting focusing on the presence of nature in works of art and the evolution of its perception.
Domínguez explained to La Vanguardia that the relationship between nature and art has always attracted his attention, especially from “the way it was represented in the Italian Renaissance, because it is very precise even if it has symbolic content, and you can see a naturalistic desire”.
The tour has two main poles, on the one hand the Italian and Flemish Renaissance, with Giotto’s lamb or the strength of Jan Van Eyck’s naturalistic work, and on the other Impressionism, but it is presented as a process, a continuum with the romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich or Paul Cézanne and his Saint Victoria mountain as a totemic element, “up to Gaugin, who for me is the last of the greats who paint nature”.
In a second part, the writer makes “a cry regarding the lack of interest of the cultural world in nature, and of the artists themselves, which reflects a detachment and the loss of connection between culture and artistic creation, with a more cosmopolitan and international art but less own, detached from the territory”.
“It is a call to recover the painting of the natural, to repaint what is seen and interpret it from the current point of view, also to protect and claim the nature that surrounds us, at a time when nature is in decline” , carry on. For Domínguez, “it sometimes seems that defending landscapes or the elements that make them up is only for naturalists, but defending the environment is not a romantic thing, because how it is seen affects us all”.
For the Valencian writer, the book is related to his previous essay The Dream of Lucretia (which won the Carles Rahola essay prize ten years ago), with a vocation to narrate and think, and it is also to some extent “a tribute to Joan Fuster’s Discredited reality, an essay that perhaps has not been sufficiently vindicated in the art world”.
In an epilogue, he also talks about current art based on an anecdote from Georges Braque and how he was distressed by the perception of a squirrel that Picasso saw in an abstract painting of his.
Nine works were submitted to the prize, convened by the Royal Academy of Good Letters of Barcelona with a jury made up of Lola Badia, Judit Carrera, Marta Segarra, Margalida Tomàs and Borja de Riquer.
As a writer, Martí Domínguez (Madrid, 1966) has specialized in narrative and essays, usually from a scientific perspective, as it could not be otherwise, being a doctor in Biology, in addition to directing the Research Method magazine.
His latest novel, Mater (Proa, 2022), explores from science fiction a world in which humanity has stopped procreating naturally and births are pure technology with optimized genetics, with a plot that by writer is his answer to the question “What makes us human?”. Art, in relation to nature, also responds.
