Koyama, Aleu and Hamilton, united by the thread of an image in Cadaqués

GironaCadaqués is a land of artists. The list of great creators fascinated by the bohemian atmosphere and idyllic setting of this town at the foot of Cap de Creus is very long, from the 19th century to the present day. Shigeyoshi Koyama, Marc Aleu, and Richard Hamilton are three of the most important, and this summer, for the first time in history, the Alto Empordà municipality has dedicated a joint exhibition to them at the Cadaqués Gallery, which can be visited until August 24.

The curator is Huco Malla, the gallery's director, who had long considered uniting these three names in a single exhibition. The origin of this obsession stems from an image: a photograph taken in the 1970s by François Bessiere, owner of the legendary Barroco bar, where the three artists appear looking at the camera, smoking and laughing with a truly genuine expression. The photo came into Malla's hands more than 10 years ago: "I thought about it a lot, whenever the photograph appeared I thought I had to do something; I was very interested in that thing so typical of Cadaqués, of the locals mingling with the internationals," explains Huc Malla, who adds: "Koyama is a hippie Japanese, Aleu a native with a very good career and Hamilton, the international star, so it seemed very nice to create a relationship between the three of them."

However, beyond the photograph, taken during a chance encounter, the three artists had no personal relationship. Seeing them from the side, made them look at the camera and portrayed them. Their works, moreover, from an aesthetic point of view, also have no similarity.

An exhibition conceived in the ancient

From this starting point, Huc Malla has chosen a series of pieces, most of which have never been seen in Cadaqués and which span a period of 10 or 15 years in the last quarter of the 20th century. And, despite the initial aesthetic differences, when put aside, the works function and foster new points of contact with interesting symbiosis. The museography, conceived in an old-fashioned way, helps, filling the walls and creating a kind of mosaic that generates constellations, in the style of Aby Warburg's visual atlases: "The idea was to make an exhibition thinking about how they would have made it at the time," says Malla, very moved by the excellent collection of artists.

Koyama (the only living artist of the three, who is already around 85 years old) landed in Cadaqués in 1970 hitchhiking and established himself as an artist, closely linked to the Cadaqués Gallery, then run by Lanfranco Bombelli. In this exhibition you can see lesser-known, truly rare pieces, such as a large painting of the Barcelona Treasury building or a 1970s Constructivist-style painting of pieces of Cadaqués. By Aleu, linked to the Dau al Set group, who became known for his painting of magical and expressionist tones, the Caraculs stand out. crouching figures wearing masks on their bottoms as if they were faces, or the humorous drawings he signed as Cram. And finally, by Hamilton, a pioneer of British pop art who came to Cadaqués at the invitation of Marcel Duchamp, there are important pieces on display, such as the first Flower piece, from 1971, together with a Shit and flower darker.