Every town has a skyline, or profile mounted on the line of the horizon, and this skyline is sometimes the main brand image of that town. Cadaqués has many skylines: the one that Meifrén pointed out in the early 1900s, with his back to the mountain; the liquid-paranoid one of Lidia Savana, because of a mad unrequited love for the dandy Eugeni d’Ors; the analytical cubist one that Picasso discovered in his boats and alleys; the rocky and baroque one, ideal for smugglers and putrefying bishops, that Buñuel devised together with Dalí for L’age d’or, the golden vanishing point moulded by Duchamp to cover the hole in his bathtub, and even the trichornic Richard where pop Hamilton’s cigarettes invariably went to die.
And I leave for the end the most important horizonist, Narcís Monturiol, who discovered the verticality of the phenomenon, pondering on the Cap de Creus while the lungs of the coral fishermen were literally bursting. Monturiol invented the submarine, and learned to navigate between sweet, bitter and salty appearances. Years later, Dalí would identify the submarine with irony, a marvellous vehicle that allowed him to cross the threshold of appearances to reach new and exciting realities, and all this without being too noticeable.
Jesús Galdón, the white hope of contemporary Spanish art, returns to this subterranean theme and, of course, turns it on its head. “On how to draw the line of the horizon” is not a typical exhibition: there are no works framed on the wall, on the contrary, a gigantic canvas frame turns its back on us to lead us, through three simultaneous installations, to an interior cage where a small retrospective is hung on the theme of the limit or horizon – in all senses – of appearances and artistic language. A gigantic cloud, made of the same material as the frames of the paintings, floats like an ichthyic from the sea beyond. An exemplary vehicle, but also an alternative to various famous attempts, such as that of Cyrano de Bergerac, who tried to reach the moon by tying himself to a pile of bottles full of dew: at sunrise, the bottles should return home, rising towards the beyond; nor should we forget here the pre-pubescent Alice, trafficker of longings on both sides of the mirror.
If Duchamp discovered the double bottom of the wardrobe, where his Mariée was hiding, Galdón incorporates conceptualism into the baroque of Alice, Piranesi and the sacred conversations of the Counter-Reformation. It plays with the boundaries of geography, gender and physics. Galdón is a skilful player of the Siete y medio, he always knows the right moment to stand up. If you think about it, that’s what the horizon is all about.
Ricard Mas Peinado
