Istituto Cervantes Napoli
Via Nazario Sauro, 23
Opening Friday 5th December 2008, 19:30h
from 5 December to 5 March 2009
43 artworks (1948 -1999)
"We are in that mysterious place, the intersection of the storm and eternity, the perfect fulfilment in the perfect vanishing. A critic puts himself in this place (contrary to the historian that continually tries to guide us through time) and he is an artist too: the Spanish painter Ramón Gaya, author of the small book "El sentimiento de la pintura" (the feeling of the painting). The Gaya's critical position appears scandalous today: it's the defeat of the history, the destruction of the psychology and of the aesthetic too, in one word: the destruction of the contemporary art criticism, and appears the direct inheritance of the one that a resourceful woman defined the first critic, the one who just announced: "I baptize you with water but after me comes he who will baptize you with spirit and fire." (Cristina Campo, Under false Name, 1960)
BIO: Ramón Gaya was born in Murcie (Spain) in 1910. After the advent of the Francoism he goes into exile in Mexico where he meets Octavio Paz and Tomás Segovia and than in Italy, where he stays for many years. In Venice and in Rome he comes into contact with the main exponents of the italian intellectual and cultural world, and with others Spanish exiles such as Maria Zambrano and Elena Croce. He persistently leads his pictorial research distant from trends and experimentalisms, firmly attached to the idea that only the figurative art can restore the most wide range of human mind's echoes. He dies in 2005.