21.09.2024 > 30.11.2024

Alarcón Criado Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the 2024/2025 season in a new exhibition space. Located across from the Castle of San Jorge, in the former Santa Ana Ceramics Factory and adjacent to the Triana Ceramics Center, the gallery will unveil its new facilities starting on September 24 with an exhibition by Pedro G. Romero titled Lo que el flamenco nos enseña. (What flamenco teaches us)

What flamenco teaches us. In fact, from the very beginning, what we call flamenco has been a significant path in my work. Since before 1988 with the Fla-Co-Men series or in my first exhibition El almacén de las ideas with pieces centered around the triptych Traducción/Tradición/Traición, years before Enrique Morente made it his emblem. In those years, José Luis Borja wrote about my work: “Se pelean en mi mente by Camarón de la Isla is just as important as Black Angel’s Death Song by The Velvet Underground.” But what always interested me about flamenco was its way of doing things, its way of living, as “lebensformen”, not so much as a semiotic commentary on identity, an irony about clichés, or nostalgia for some lost childhood. I think it was in 2005 when someone reviewed my exhibition La ciudad vacía, with the Archivo F.X. at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona: “I thought this was an exhibition about iconoclasm, and it is, but it’s contaminated by the vice of flamenco; everything that moves, goes up and down stairs, is inevitably flamenco.” I believe the intent was derogatory, but I took it as a good sign. And here I am still. That’s why it has been so hard for me to teach, precisely, what flamenco has taught me. But that’s not the case in recent years. Things have changed, and one could think flamenco has also come of age.

What flamenco teaches us. That’s what interests me, what it teaches. Obviously, there is a pedagogical dimension to that “teaching,” but the word also means to show, to exhibit, to expose, without losing that reductive, almost pediatric sense. My work, I’ve said it many times, I don’t really know what it is, but it surely comes from something that was organized around the Mozarabic Beatus, Paolo Ucello, and Antonia di Paolo, the workshops of Bosch, or the extended Brueghel family, precisely at times when a certain autonomy was forming within the visual regime of art, tightly linked to the inventions of courtly love or paper currency, to give some examples. Flamenco too, I fear, is “enseña” (a symbol), and in that sense, this exhibition extensively explores those marks. Especially in two works: on one hand, the long series Flamenca, co, from the…, up to 21 pieces that attempt to group together the different meanings that have been given to the word “flamenco,” its reasons, and the various fields that this polyphony of meanings opens up; on the other hand, Banderizas, a sort of portrait of three friends, three flamencas: María Cabral, Pastori Filigrana, and Lorena Padilla, portraits that owe much to the famous tango from Triana: “How beautiful Triana looks when they hang gypsy flags on the bridge.” Or maybe it should have been sung “republican flags.”

What flamenco teaches us is also an exhibition at the Alarcón Criado Gallery, gallerists and good friends, for whom I was preparing this exhibition in the space they had on Velarde Street, and now they have come up with the idea to move to a new and large space, in Triana, to a wing of the old Santa Ana Ceramic Factory, right next to the office of the Seville Flamenco Biennial and the Helios Gómez Room in the Municipal Ceramics Museum. This shift —literally “enseña” also means “to follow a path, to become, to drift”— has forced me, when the works were practically finished, to immerse myself in Triana, in a certain imagery of the neighborhood. Indeed, this displacement is no small thing. Flamencos know it well. Triana is a myth, it’s true, an ancient and modern myth. From the ancient Trastevere and its bohemia to the speculations about the expulsion of the gypsies from La Cava in the mid-20th century, speculations that were not just real estate-related. In that sense, regarding Seville, Triana has always functioned as “Khôra”, in the Platonic sense of the word. A space where logos and myth operate simultaneously. For these latest works, the shift to Triana has been fundamental. Reconnecting with the Soleá of the potters, with the holy women, iconoclasts and ceramists, Justa and Rufina, with Torrigiano on hunger strike in the Inquisition’s prison for smashing a statue of the Virgin that he himself had modeled and fired, also there, in Triana. Goya, the first artist to understand how flamenco works even before it was called flamenco, grasped these paradoxes of ours well: how can two saints, famous for destroying idols, be the patron saints of the most iconodulic city par excellence? How could the artist who invented sacred imagery, the famous Torrigiano, be punished as an iconoclast? How could the same people who were persecuted, imprisoned, and enslaved—blacks, Moors, Jews, Gypsies, mercheros, Flemish, and Germans—be throwing parties—dances, songs, and music—with the same ingenuity as philosophers?

Pedro G. Romero
Lo que el flamenco nos enseña

With the participation of:
María Cabral, Pastora Filigrana, Lorena Padilla
Luz Arcas, Úrsula López, Antonio Molina El Choro, Leonor Leal
Filiep Tacq, Trijne Vermunt, Nuria Rodríguez Riestra
Perrate, Gabriel de la Tomasa
Israel Galván, Rocío Marquéz, Niño de Elche.

With pieces by:
Helios Gómez, José Manuel Capuletti, Lucien Roisin
Constant Nieuwenhuys 

With the collaboration:
Antonio Molina Flores, Joaquín Aneri, Jesús Ponce,
Antonio Barrera Carpinteros, Sevilla Rotulación,
R2dom, Debaga Tattoing Textiles,
Fábrica de Cerámicas Santa Ana, Marcos Velázquez
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