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Arturo Comas: art on a slant in Genalguacil

Arturo Comas: art on a slant in Genalguacil

This village has earned itself a starring role on the national and international contemporary art scene through its Encuentros de Arte, an event that attracts artists to its streets every two years

ANTONIO JAVIER LÓPEZ

Monday, 12 July 2021, 07:53

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It was just an ordinary evening, walking down Calle La Lomilla after one of their innumerable conversations, when an orange appeared. It rolled past them down the hill until it disappeared into the darkness. Its pace was almost hypnotic, naturally and definitively beautiful.

Arturo Comas and Juan Francisco Rueda stopped walking, looked at one another, smiled and realised that they had just shared something of a revelation. It had triggered a fuse in their heads, lighting the spark of their love of turning reality into poetry, the desire to make a game of something as serious as humour and the conviction that all of that could only have been possible in a place like Genalguacil.

Barely 400 residents

This village with barely 400 residents in the Genal Valley near Ronda has earned itself a starring role on the national and international contemporary art scene through its Encuentros de Arte, an event that attracts artists to its streets every two years, and which is now a quarter of a century old. Its cultural programme has been able to combat the drama of depopulation as well as the lack of institutional support and the territorial imbalance that in this case is quite literal.

You see, Genalguacil lives on a slope, upward or downward, depending on how you look at it. The average incline of its streets lined with whitewashed houses is 10 per cent. And just that, 10º, is the title of the exhibition that Comas has opened in the Genalguacil museum, curated by Rueda.

"I can't help noticing things that have always been there, but intended for other things, people are not normally aware of them. I've focused on everyday objects and situations in Genalguacil," said Comas.

And here we find the plant pot wedged to keep it level on the sloping ground; we see the rolling oranges turned here into sculptures; or the piles of chairs forming a poetic parabola.

"In Genalguacil all these elements are a way of solving the problem of the incline, but I like to take it up a notch and turn it into a work of art," said the artist.

However, as Comas pointed out, there is another side to 10º. "My modus operandi is to subvert. Genalguacil has made the idea of a museum village part of its identity, a project to take art into the street, to take the museum into the street, and on this occasion, I wanted to go in the other direction and take the street into the museum."

He does this with an installation on the first floor of the building. Without giving too much away and spoiling the effect, it's enough to say, perhaps, that the artist recreates the incline on which all the villagers live their lives.

"This slope, calculated to be an incline of 10%, is what has led to the many solutions that the people of Genalguacil have developed to overcome it and is what gives a special character to the everyday life of the village and its people. The wedges used to straighten different elements are part of this," writes Rueda in the exhibition text.

A village in the capital

And from mountain village to the grand Spanish capital, Genalguacil shows its influence in contemporary art circles as the only representative from the province of Malaga at the Arco fair that opened this week in Madrid.

The village delegation has taken three works to Arco: a mosaic by Fernando Renes made especially for the occasion; a piece by Raquel Serrano; and another by Arturo Comas, coinciding with his exhibition in situ.

"Being at Arco is in some ways the culmination of a project and also the answer to a job well done. In this way the stand is a tool to show what Genalguacil Pueblo Museo stands for, as a socio-cultural strategy for repopulation through contemporary art. We want to display our faith in the project as a weapon of social transformation," said Rueda.

The tiled mosaic by Fernando Renes set up at Arco covers more than six square metres; it will eventually become part of the village's artistic landscape along with other works by the artist in the village since 2017.

Alongside the mosaic is one of the delicious works on paper that Raquel Serrano created in the last Encuentros de Arte, picking up the irregularities of some of the most unusual walls in the village.

And the stand in Madrid is completed with a photograph by Arturo Comas in which locals carry a device designed to balance a glass of wine on the sloping streets.

"We are very excited to be here, because we have been working for many years to come on our own merit," said the village mayor Miguel Ángel Herrera.

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