Kepa Garraza: Propaganda

Bosco Sodi: Cuatro grandes alegorías

The Álvaro Alcázar Gallery presents two solo exhibitions, Kepa Garraza and Bosco Sodi from February 25 to April 11, 2020.

In Propaganda, Kepa Garraza presents ten of his most recent works and reflects on the nature of the images we consume daily. This exhibition is presented as a series of drawings through which the artist wants to analyze the representation of power throughout history. In order to achieve this, he has used a serie of images that have been used as political, military or revolutionary propaganda from ancient Greece to the present day. The selection of these images responds to personal preferences and a very specific way of reading and interpreting the story. This project has, therefore, the intention of reflecting on the way in which power has been represented throughout the centuries, as well as showing the fundamental role that art has played in this process. The history of art has, therefore, a key importance in the development of this project, since a good part of the images that Kepa Garraza has used as references to make these drawings correspond to paintings and sculptures that throughout the centuries have been used as a political tool. Photography and cinema are obviously two other sources of powerful inspiration, especially for those works that refer to events that occurred in the 20th and 21st centuries. His intention with these works is none other than to reflect on the role of art within our society and highlight something that is not new: the political and social dimension of art and its inevitable influence on the development and narration of history.

Bosco Sodi presents four of his most recent works, made ad hoc for the Álvaro Alcázar Gallery space. Four great allegories (Homage to Goya) is an exhibition in which the artist wanted to make a particular nod to the set of four tondos, made by Goya commissioned by Manuel Godoy at the beginning of the 19th century, initially known as the four allegories. Goya had painted these four tondos to express the ideals of the Enlightenment and Sodi reinterprets them creating four works that explore the areas in which nature and humanity combine and look for the beauty implicit in destruction.

Sodi focuses in the symbolism of the color black treating it in its purest definition: the absence of light. As Goya was able to perceive it at a certain moment in Illustrated Spain, light is reason and does not exist without darkness. It is the shadow that reveals the lack of lucidity, it is “the dream of reason that produces monsters”. Sodi resembles that lack of light to that non-use of reason and stops at the drama generated by the shadow. As a contemporary artist, he recreates himself in the materiality of the painting, giving rise to an almost organic appearance that highlights even more, if he can, the color black. Perhaps the artist is inviting us to reflect on the darkness that sometimes plunges us as a society into a well of irrationality. In this work, Sodi not only dyes Goya’s work black, but also destroys the regularity of the format of those four works. Its four interpretations are circular, yes, but they are not the same size and thus create an emotional imbalance typical of desolation. What allegory would each work represent, and what would have grown or waned in our contemporary era? It is up to us to reflect on the current weight in our society of Commerce, Industry, Agriculture and Science.