The Vila Casas Foundation rediscovers the freest and most biting Calsina
The drawings of the Barcelona artist are reminiscent of his critical nature and his solidarity with the disadvantaged.
BarcelonaWith a rather caustic sense of humor, the painter Ramon Calsina (1901-1992) used to say that he was born drawing, just as someone else might be born "hunchbacked," as his son Ramon recalled a few years ago. Thus, in addition to his artistic talent, another reason for his marginalization was his critical and introverted nature. For the more conservative public, he was too contemporary an artist. And for the more progressive, Calsina was too traditional. "He's an uncomfortable figure for many people because he's difficult to categorize," notes Bernat Puigdollers, artistic director of the Vila Casas Foundation, on the occasion of the exhibition of Calsina's drawings currently on display. in the Volart Spaces until March 15, which he also curated.
"Formally, Calsina is rather a classical, academic painter, but the underlying issue is uncomfortable because he is critical, sometimes even grotesque, and can be unpleasant," says Puigdollers. "Drawing is where he is genuinely Calsina and where he feels free to do what he wants," he emphasizes. "He had a lot of trouble selling his paintings, and his drawings were practically impossible to sell," his son explained. "Some are almost a century old, but it doesn't matter because they are still relevant. He dedicated himself to portraying the human soul with all its miseries and weaknesses, and unfortunately, in a hundred years, we haven't progressed much."
The exhibition is titled Ramon Calsina. human miseries It includes a hundred works spanning the artist's entire career, many of them previously unseen. The array of characters, all of them harrowing, is disturbing: there's a mediocre university professor—he was a beloved teacher at the Lonja art fair—artists who sell out on the market, cuckolds, abusers, and battered women at a time when this drama was taboo, and a starving mother in the immediate aftermath of the war. There's also a soldier who maintains his pride despite losing his legs and an arm, a wounded bullfighter, and a woman who, from her ironing board, watches her dreams vanish. One of the most poignant characters is Tracoma, a girl from Poblenou who went blind as a result of an illness. "When Calsina draws, he also thinks, and he engages in critique and politics. He doesn't resort to propaganda, but rather reflects on his own society," says Puigdollers.
As for his painting, represented by works such as Burden (1934), has a certain endearing quality. "Calsina's work is like that of a child who thinks the world is beautiful and perfect. But when he sees reality, he finds that the world isn't as he expected, and he experiences a moment of reality shock and needs to draw and explain it to process it and, at the same time, maintain this innocence. Calsina shows you a raw moment, but there's always, always," says the curator.
An honest artist in times of black marketeering
Ramon Calsina was born in Poblenou into a family of bakers. He trained at the Lonja School of Fine Arts, where he received two travel grants. The first of these allowed him to travel to Granada with the painter Miquel Ferrer, one of his closest friends. Calsina was struck by the contrast between Barcelona and rural Granada, a city with vast social inequalities. In the portrait he painted of the disabled daughter of the innkeepers where they stayed, his efforts to dignify humble people are already evident. Calsina used the money from the second grant to travel to Paris. He shared it with Ferrer, but a misunderstanding regarding the money led to the end of their friendship.
The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War interrupted the modernity Calsina had begun to explore in poster projects, which are among the highlights of the exhibition. Although he was not affiliated with any political party, Calsina went into exile because of the republican and leftist ideals he had publicly expressed. He was interned in the Argelès concentration camp. Overwhelmed by homesickness, he returned to Catalonia through the Basque Country, and was imprisoned in the Vitoria concentration camp.
"He returned broken, and found a Barcelona that was no longer what he had imagined," says Puigdollers. In fact, in his first exhibition after his return, he showed some of his harrowing drawings, and the critics reproached him for it. "They accused him of trying to revive a bygone era, of madness, and told him that this was a civilized and orderly time. People were being executed at Camp de la Bota, just a few streets from his house," says the curator. To escape this, they recommended that he dedicate himself to painting still lifes. "Still lifes were what the bourgeoisie, enriched by the black market, wanted. They wanted a pleasing, sumptuous art that would give them status. Calsina tried, but he was so incapable of being accommodating that, even when he did, his still lifes from this period have this decadent touch." This is from the illustrations Calsina created for works by authors including Edgar Allan Poe and Miguel de Cervantes.
