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Realist art has deep roots in Spain. The fascination with the real, springs, not from one, but from several sources. There is a feeling for the sacredness of ordinary things, which also manifests itself in Spanish religious art. There is also a very earthy kind of Spanish sensuality – a relish for the texture of freshly baked bread, the succulence of ripe fruit, and, of course, for the texture of human skin. All of these elements are present in the current exhibition.
The paintings have been made artists who are twin brothers. They paint together, in the sense that they share a studio, but each work is the product of a single of a single individual. It is important, not only that they are Spanish, but that they are Catalan, and live and work in Barcelona. Their forenames immediately signal their loyalty to the Catalan ethos.
Catalonia has long prided itself on having a culture that is different from that of the rest of Spain. Its inhabitants speak Spanish, but they also speak their own language – Catalan. Barcelona, the largest city in Catalonia, has long had a reputation for being the chief centre of innovation in the Iberian peninsula. The earliest stirring of Modernist ideas in Spain was Catalan Modernismo – linked to the rise of Art Nouveau in France. This was the style that influenced Picasso in his early Blue Period.
Later, during the time of the Franco dictatorship, the Barcelona-based Dau al Set group, whose most prominent member was Antoni Tŕpies, marked the beginning of a revolt against the oppressive cultural norms then being enforced by the central government in Madrid.
It may be wondered – legitimately – why the Santilari brothers have chosen to revert to an apparently conservative style, which rejects both the Symbolist ethos of Modernismo and the semi-surrealism of the Dau al Set. The answer is not difficult to find if one looks attentively at their paintings, the still lifes in particular.
The still lifes are full of deliberately placed indications that these are in no sense pastiches of the art of the past. The slices of cheese, for example, are often wrapped in transparent plastic, just as one would get them from the supermarket. Fruit is piled in tinfoil trays. The lusciousness of the fruit is rendered with extraordinary skill, but so too is the sheen of the plastic and the luster of the tinfoil. All of this is intended to demonstrate the ‘contemporary’ nature of the subject matter. The quotidian has its rights; ordinary life and ordinary pleasures are as sacred now as they were in the time of Zurbarán and Juan Sanchez Cotán. One thing to notice about these still lifes is that Barcelona has always prided itself on possessing a proletarian culture, not an aristocratic one. The images of cheese and fruit speak of everyday meals, put on the table for ordinary families. There is a link here to some of the kitchen still lifes of Chardin.
The female nudes are a somewhat different matter. Spain does not have a continuous tradition of painting from the nude – most especially not from the female nude. The influence of the church was always too strong. There are, however, one of two very famous Spanish paintings of this subject, most notably the Rokeby Venus by Velazquez, now in the National Gallery in London, and the Maja Desnuda by Goya in the Prado. Both painting read like acts of deliberate defiance, signaling opposition to inherited cultural norms.
Even in the age of the pinup, the female nudes of the Santilari brothers have an element of this. Read in the particular cultural context provided by Barcelona, they speak of democracy and secularism – of the painter’s right to do as he pleases and the model’s equal right to divest herself of her clothes. Cinemagoers will perhaps be reminded of certain scenes in the films of Pedro Almodóvar, for example the seductive images of Penelope Cruz in the recent Broken Embraces. Almodóvar originally comes from Castile, not Catalonia, but his films are nevertheless eloquent of the ethos of contemporary Spain. In the creation of this new culture, Barcelona has played a leading role.
The nudes are modern, but the skills used to create them are rooted as deeply in the Spanish artistic tradition as the Santillari brothers’ still life paintings. They turn a new page in the long history of Spanish art.
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