- ALBUM: .24 hours in the Prado Museum
Within the Museo del Prado, photographer Carlos García Pozo has spent many days. A tenant agreed, discreet, attentive, peeper, alone. Very few enjoy this privilege: having the Prado as a playroom, as a space for thinking, as a spying corner. Among the flow of tourists a man can live in perfect anonymity, wandering from room to room. Enjoying the most capricious of the art galleries of the world , the one that does not seek to embrace the History of Art (like the National Gallery in London), but it is enough to welcome the best of art, an uncontaminated light against the garbage dump of today Wait outside for the citizen.
El Prado, Ramón Gómez de la Serna said it better than anyone, is the cathedral of Madrid. The truly. There where history has been slipping for 200 years as a lavish republic following the crazy map that painters drew, each in its own way. It is possible to go from the splendor of the Quattrocento according to the golden delicacy of Fra Angelico (The Annunciation), to the flamenco severity of Van der Weyden (Descent from the cross). And on the road stumble upon Rubens, with El Greco, with Titian, with Murillo, with the only Rembrandt painting there is. Or reach Velázquez and understand in amazement that, sometimes, reality is nothing more than a stab in the back.
This museum summons in and out of its rooms a shared history in many directions. The Prado suggests, clears, theorizes, confirms, proposes. It is an instrument of dialogue. And by consensus. And by heart. And tomorrow Because the Prado is not a place of work or heated carnival, but of life. Between Rafael (The Cardinal), Dürer (Self-Portrait), El Greco (The Knight's Hand in the Chest) and Goya (Family of Charles IV) you can draw the four corners of Europe , of a Europe that was before in art that in parliaments From a Europe that nests in the Prado and from there it extends to us. Looking at the Prado is also observing the world. Our world.
This gallery is a unique specimen of its kind. The least narrative of classical art museums. Patinir (The passage of the Styx lagoon) and Sofonisba Anguissola (Felipe II) coexist. Combine Jordaens (Three traveling musicians) with Ribera (Jacob's dream). It may be that this is the Spanish miracle, after much trouble. A museum that besides the museum is belief. A museum that was made of adding several royal collections, with no other academy than its unusual pulse, with no more science than the masters that give it meaning and form.
It is not an enclosure of passage, but a place to meet anyone, with oneself, with what goes out to the path of the galleries and the rooms, with the painting. It is the last trace of the Enlightenment that in Spain passed by. It contains atrocious Spain and placid Spain. Kings and jesters. Pestles and murderers. Paganism. Divinity. But, at the same time, it is a mirror of a clean country that does not want to overlap its morale.
A day at the Museo del Prado dispenses something more than walking among masterpieces of art. It is a territory for amazement : there is always something new to discover in what you have already seen too many times. A detail. A gesture. A shadow. A regret Let's say it never runs out. And it does not require who goes into the gym to decipher it. This museum is revealed alone, as the hours go by . And never tires your eyes. In that it looks like the good seas. In his wide repertoire of nuances everyone finds what they are looking for. Just want to stop for a while.
The bicentennial has returned the Prado to the street, to the people. It is as if turning 200 had brought him closer, revived even more. The Prado not exactly as a work, but as a process to ask about its original substance and the ability to articulate a way of understanding culture. Gone are the times when the museum had some hallucinated crypt . The extension and reorganization of the collection deposited it in the 21st century. Today it is a modern museum that lives on the glow of memory , but without losing its status as a future place.
Numerous contemporary artists were (and are) attracted to treasures. And they have made the work of some teachers part of their search and why. Pollock recklessly approaching El Greco. Motherwell seduced by the dog eternalized in the sand of Goya. Antonio Saura with the obsession with Velázquez as the center of a whole that was much greater than life. The reclining Nude of Picasso, melodious and arrogant, with his eyes on the naked Maja of Goya. In Las Meninas insists Richard Hamilton. And Oteiza also pays tribute to Velázquez with a gesture of a certain redemptive authority. Because in the Prado everything fits : from art to the sequence of the Transition, democracy and the collective imagination of a country that trajina, studies and manipulates its past strangely.
The ability to attract art exhibited by the Prado not only has to do with its quality, but with its character. The nineteenth century, for so many years hidden, returned just over a decade ago to confirm the extraordinary Spanish painting of that time: Fortuny, Sorolla, Pinazo, Rosales, Madrazo, Lucas. Before destiny, the Prado was their home for them. What remains. The painters house. And even more: his protective refuge. Now and in hard times like the postwar and dictatorship years. The Prado was a place where one got rid of the outside. Of the grayness. Of the outer dirt.
The photographer Carlos García Pozo knows what it is about when he talks about the resting pavilion that is also this art gallery. Live it, watch it live, portray it, watch it without haste, see life go by as an alien dream, distant from the urgency, out of the street noise, clicks and successive alarms, notifications. Because time was never so fast. Because time is more true in that calm place that in two centuries has not stopped driving us. To move. To be still.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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