The exhibition "It is the sunlight that warms the room" offers a rapprochement of avant-garde art to the thoughts and works of the great creators of the past. We make a nod of complicity to the Bicentennial of the Prado Museum through paraphrases and revisions of widely circulated works of art.
The title is a sentence that Wolf Vostell stated attempting to explain the purpose of art, in his view: to point out the events and behaviors of the human being, even if they cannot be changed. Thus, art is above them and it is not the humans who make it that perform the function, but art itself. Therefore, the action of resuming, of influencing ideas or meanings is a very common practice in the history of artistic creation. The term paraphrase, then can be considered an exercise of reflection and inspiration, without giving up the necessary personality of a new artwork.
The artist who reinterprets returns to those places where his gaze has grown. From there, the work will be "brought" into the present with another language and another format. Following this alteration, dialogue or confrontation will arise, as well as, even the need to abolish, to some extent, its original essence in order to embrace new principles.
Then, can paraphrasing be translated into an extension of the meaning of the original work? Can this meaning be clarified? What is the outcome of the new approach, from the time of an artist who interprets a previous narrative? These and other issues are outlined in the many possible itineraries of this exhibition.
"It is the sunlight that warms the room" displays works by Juan Hidalgo, Túlia Saldanha, Shigeko Kubota, Daniel Spoerri, Concha Jerez, José Iges, Boris Lurie and Wolf Vostell.
These works reveal the origins, influences and sometimes even the family tree of their artistic practices. For all of them, to look back to the original inspiration is essential to move forward.