Unsuccessful cartoons about domestic well-being, portraits of unintentionally monstrous babies. Pompous religious allegories with abstruse meanings, the most banal still lifes created by amateur painters on a Sunday afternoon. The excessive solemnity that characterizes the pompous and the frivolous banality of petit-bourgeois taste that is reflected in mediocre pastiches by Picasso or Degas. Anything but undisputed masterpieces are found in Bad Painting?, the new exhibition at Can Framis (Barcelona). The exhibition proposes a kind of counter-history of figurative painting through a selection of the worst paintings from the collection of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), from which most of the works come, supplemented by two private collections : the Pazos Cuchillo Foundation and the Foundation Vila Casas, promoter of this unusual initiative.
The exhibition is curated by essayist Eloy Fernández Porta and artist Carlos Pazos, who also exhibits a small group of his own work, as if it were a contemporary counterpoint, suggestive but not always necessary, to a brilliant hodgepodge of mediocre canvases that produces in between were 1850 and 1950. They represent a monumental history of Catalan kitsch for which it is difficult to find precedents of greatness. The only one could be that of Dalí with his unfinished book project The Art of History, whose intention was “to show that all painters who were said to be good were bad and vice versa”.
Out of intellectual honesty, the exhibition does not seek to provoke such an inversion of values, although the question that ends its title pushes us to a certain aesthetic and moral abyss. Are those paintings full of lousy visual solutions, unfortunate compositions, crooked lines, and mismatched axes that terrible? In each of the thematic areas of the exhibition there is at least one example that causes a certain dizziness in the viewer. And he wonders if this bastard painting, which was just gathering dust in a museum depot a few weeks ago, is as bad as it seems.
“Entrament de Jesús” (1941), by Marià Pidelaserra, one of the works from the MNAC Collection exhibited in “Bad Painting?”.MNAC
The asymmetrical reflections of a woman’s portrait by Francesc Piñol raise legitimate doubts: is it the same woman, an evil twin, a ghost from the past? The interpretive rifts these third-rate painters open could be as exciting as the polysemy of the greatest masterpieces. Ismael Smith Marí’s family portraits, odes to conjugal love and parent-child love, reflect a strangeness associated with the tranny. Francesc Domingo’s children seem possessed, in a seemingly unconscious display of an innate malevolence. And the indecipherable Allegory of Doctor Robert (1890) by Aleix Clapés contains incomprehensible riddles in the form of uncomfortable subtexts. The best example of this ambiguity, however, is The Life of Jesus (1941), a series of paintings by Marià Pidelaserra, a half-forgotten Catalan Impressionist, depicting Christ’s Stations of the Cross. It ends with an oil painting in which the preacher appears tinted an almost alien green, in a wonderful metaphor, due to his apparent unconsciousness, of the historical figure’s illusory character.
The amount of ideas that the exhibition concentrates in the short corridor in which it is presented is extraordinary, from its analysis of the scattered beauty of the carrincló (cheesy, primitive or rancid in Catalan) to the investigation of the undeniable links of this particular subgenre with homosexual culture in which the camp functions as a ritual and also as a sign of identity. The tour exudes a perfect blend of highly original curation, critical theory and accessible scholarship that museums with more resources and reach could learn from. It’s not an unprecedented initiative—there are precedents like the 1978 exhibition “Bad” Painting at the New Museum in New York, or the Museum of Bad Art founded in Boston in 1994, in addition to Susan Sontag’s writings about Camp and the claim bad taste by John Waters— , but it is an exciting approach to collections that nobody has dared to observe from this perspective. His irreverence should seem relative by now, but is almost radical in such a submissive and ceremonial art landscape.
“Bad painting?”. Can Framis. Barcelona. Until June 4th.
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