The Sacred Museum of Teruel hosts from this Friday the exhibition of the winning and selected pieces of the I Spiritu 2022 National Prize for Young Contemporary Art, awarded just over a month ago. The prize of this call for students of Fine Arts and graduates of four years of maximum seniority, endowed by Fundación Térvalis with 1,000 euros, went to Luis Salvador from Zamora, with fragmentsan installation piece made up of small pieces that reflects on “the incomprehensible enigma of faith”, according to its author.
Along with it, the two pieces that won second prize in the contest occupy a privileged place: Lar of Spiritsculptural piece in alabaster by Mateo Patón, and Approaches to the Psyché, by Andrea Tolosa-Cotoré, a video installation product of a performance and an installation created by the woman from Zaragoza. Simultaneously, the two artists trained in Fine Arts in Teruel are also exhibiting installations on the university campus, Casa Común and Ven a jugar conmigo, product of the second prize they obtained in another first edition of an art competition in which Fundación Térvalis also collaborates.
In addition, Luis Salvador, Mateo Patón and Andrea Tolosa-Cotoré, also exhibiting in the exhibition that will last until January 15, the authors of eleven other works presented for the National Spiritu Prize, selected from a total of 30 received in the contest. They are Iván Chillarón Camacho, Patricia Collado, Jessica Duque, Trini Energici, Malena Goya, Elisabeth Grau, Salvador Jiménez-Donaire, José Ángel Nava Martínez, Yasmina Oliveros Ortín, Elena P. Cuesta and Laura Prados.
The set of exhibited work reflects on concepts related to faith and spirituality, but not necessarily from a religious point of view, but much broader, delving into issues such as transcendence, death, feelings, the meaning of existence , religious beliefs, the value of human relationships or the search for the divine, among others.
Luis Salvador alludes to what for him is “the incomprehensible enigma of faith” with a metaphor that he builds with a series of found objects and fragments, from different sources, which in some cases he has rescued from oblivion and in others have been ceded over time by friends or people around you. During the inauguration Luis Salvador, who comes from Sanzoles del Vino, a town in Zamora, explained that as a believer he considers it important to show that part of his nature through art, despite the fact that “for many years I denied that spirituality and preferred to remove it from my work, although in some involuntary way it was almost always present”. “But there came a time when I decided to accept that reality and not keep hiding it. That is why this piece is very important to me, and I am happy that it becomes part of the collections of the Museo de Arte Sacro de Teruel”.
Salvador reproduces the idea of the mystery of faith in the first place through the disparate origin of each of the small objects made of wax, wood, steel, brass, paper or tin, as well as the fact that, being fragmented and incomplete in the Most of them, our brain reconstitutes them almost unconsciously when we look at them, perhaps similar to how it fills in the gaps that faith leaves empty in reason.
For his part, Mateo Patón from La Rioja exposes Lar of the Spirit, made up of a piece carved in alabaster and four photographs of an intervention in nature, in which the piece appears half buried in the earth as if it were a seed, or standing on the grass. Patón has worked on numerous occasions on the concept of home or house, whether as a representation of the safe public space where we meet others, the private space where we meet ourselves, or the body itself understood as a container. On this occasion he takes up that theme of the home, to which the term lar refers.
The Zaragozan Tolosa-Cotoré collects in the video installation Approaches to the Psyche a performance about anguish, which is also related to the concept of origin through a butterfly chrysalis. She relates this lepidopteran with psychology, one of the fields of reflection in art that interests the artist the most, taking the origin of the Greek word psyche as a synonym for butterfly, from which it gradually became breath, spirit and soul.
As for the rest of the pieces, the selection stands out for the variety of techniques and disciplines, in addition to its quality, in the opinion of what the selection committee for the work, made up of Soledad Córdoba, Silvia Hernández, Paco López and José Prieto, assured. when he made his decision public.
Ivan Chillaron presents Meeting, abstract graphic piece with pigment and oil on paper; Patricia Collado collects through photography House of Spirituality María Reparadora. July 02, 2019, a documentary study on a convent in ruins, in Getxo (Vizcaya); and Jessica Duque explores in Krystallos the role of luminosity, translucency and the texture of glass in the role it has played as an inspiration for spirituality and mysticism, as opposed to the weight of the earthly.
Maria Trinidad Energici presents VA_blue, a piece halfway between painting and sculpture, created with acrylic, polyvinyl acetate, polyurethane, pigments and quartz. According to the author, the piece is part of a larger series conceived during the pandemic, which represents the melancholy that breaks into thought, clouding it, and that used different industrial materials as part of the author’s experimentation to incorporate them into her artistic discourse.
Malena Goya presents an interesting graphic work on a printed panel, titled premortem, that through scratched oil, with blood and ocher colors and gloomy and blurred, obsessive shapes, he wonders about the quality of the human. The work is completed with a sound piece that extends the experience of immersing yourself in the painting.
Elisabeth Grau alludes to sháar to ancient religious and mystical myths. That Hebrew word means a door not only on the physical plane, but also as a means of entry to another plane, to spirituality, to light. The work takes the form of five cyanotype images, in which a symbolic structure is progressively fleshed out, topped by an olive branch, and which contains symbolic elements such as the cross or the circle.
Salvador Jimenez-Donaire presents No titlewood panel pigmented with lapis lazuli, and José Ángel Nava Martínez exhibits a figurative pastel on panel entitled Entreme donde no supe, a portrait of San Juan de la Cruz accompanied by the author’s verses.
For her part, Yasmina Oliveros Ortín exposes to be again, oil and gold leaf on panel. It is a figurative painting without a direct referent, and that according to the author herself explained yesterday, she began to paint after visiting the Museum of Sacred Art, which she confesses impressed her.
Elena P. Cuesta Popular Reliquary, a piece created with fabrics, paper and various materials, which emphasizes Christianity, religion and folklore. Lastly, Laura Prados Pérez presents Kerigma, a mixed technique material canvas, created with organic materials (among them a fox skull) and natural elements such as stones, sand, dust or branches. The piece alludes to the relationship between the body and its environment, to the earthly connection of the divine and the cyclical nature of the passage from life to death, which defines what is fundamental, according to the author, of religiosity and faith.
During the opening ceremony at the Museum, it was possible to enjoy Stringed Verses, a formation created ad hoc by two musicians, the students of Fine Arts Iván Pérez Flores or Denis Sebastián Prundus, and the artist and poet, already graduated, Mateo Patón, author of one of the awarded works. The trio offered a splendid and brief performance in which Patón read two of his own poems, and a third, Pueblo, by Pablowski. The one from Petrer was the winner a few weeks ago of the National Final of the Poetry Slam – duels of declamation of poems – that took place in Santiago de Compostela, an appointment in which Mateo Patón represented Teruel as the winner of the tournament in our city.
Innovative exhibition project
During the inauguration, the Sacred Museum was able to count on the presence of some of the artists behind the exhibition, together with the mayoress Emma Buj and Elena Utrilla, from the Térvalis Foundation, as well as the coordinators of the exhibition, the director of the Museum of Sacred Art of Teruel, Pedro Luis Hernando, and the curator of this center, Belén Díaz.
Buj and Utrilla expressed their intention to continue supporting artistic creation from their respective fields and specifically the exhibition project of the Museum of Sacred Art of Teruel, which since March regularly organizes art exhibitions
contemporary, not necessarily religious, which during the weeks that the exhibition lasts coexist with the pieces of the permanent exhibition, “enriching each other”, as Pedro Luis Hernando recalled yesterday.
Within this new and interesting project, which means, among other things, opening this Museum to contemporary art and the work of young artists, linked or not to religious art, and adding a new temporary exhibition hall to Teruel, the Art Museum Sacro has taken a new step by instituting the I Spiritu National Art Prize, endowed with 1,000 euros sponsored by the Térvalis Foundation and open without complexes to creation from any creed or religious position. Hernando assured that this first edition of the contest has exceeded all expectations in terms of impact in the media, in participation -30 works were presented, of which 24 entered the competition-, and in the quality of the proposals, for which nothing should prevent the II National Spiritu Competition from taking place next year.
The Museum of Sacred Art of Teruel exhibits the pieces of the I National Spiritu Contest