A visit to Casa-Museo Zacarías González, Salamanca

Zacarías González is not a name that appears in many art books or catalogues. It’s not a name that appears on the title tags in many public galleries. It does appear attached to the name of a less than significant building in Calle Alcaron in Salamanca, the Casa-Museo Zacarías González.

Zacarías González was an artist. He was also a teacher. He taught drawing. He was born in 1923 and died in 2003. He lived most of his life in Salamanca, the city of his birth. He spent some time in Madrid, some on national service in Navarra and, in later years, when the Castilian winter was felt more keenly, he headed south to Alicante. He was a lifelong teacher of drawing and painted in his spare time. He does not seem to have travelled extensively.

In the Calle Alcaron gallery, a visitor can see most of the artist’s life’s work, which divides itself across three broad periods, the representational, the abstract and the re-discovery of a changed realism. Zacarías González is largely unknown in international art circles, hardly known even in Spain and is a name that only aficionados in Salamanca would recognise. So why devote an article to him? The answer is simple. It’s the quality of the experience that deserves publicity and wider appreciation.

In his biographical note in the gallery’s excellent catalogue, Louis Javier Moreno observes that for many twentieth century artists, the life is the art. In the case of Zacarías González, however, he insists that this should be inverted so that for this artist, the art was his life. These are pictures that are intensely personal, enigmatic, intellectual, reflective, self-analytical, self-critical, refined, ascetic. They are also incredibly beautiful. At no point does this work try to shock, strive for noticeable individuality above communication, use overstatement to momentarily shock. Everything here simply communicates.

As an artist, Zacarías González seems to have visited several twentieth century styles in the same analytical way that an interested tourist might become familiar with a new place. He seems always to have been learning, but his powers of assimilation were considerable. He notices stylistic detail, contextualizes it within his own experience and then, rather than copy its dictates, he uses this assimilated language to communicate a personal world in visual form.

And so here, in three floors of this Casa-Museo set in a modest house, we are presented with recognisable associations of early Picasso, cubism, di Chirico-like surrealism, Tapies-like enigmatic abstraction, classical forms that might have been painted on the plaster of Pompei, Klee and Rouault and probably quite a lot more. But these are not copies. They are not imitations. They are personal works that inhabit a stylistic world and use the language of that world to share potential expression and thus, via that learned assimilated language, state something profoundly personal, and thus quite different from the still identifiable influence.

The gallery’s website is at https://casamuseozacariasgonzalez.com/ and many of the works it houses may be viewed there. Personal highlights included Cerrada hasta octubre, Fuga, Fuego fatuo, Charra, La tunecina, El viaje del Dios, Viejo, viejo Mondrian, La suite de Nueva Orleans, and many more.

One of the joys of traveling in Spain is to share the oft-expressed pride in local heroes, be they artists, writers, musicians, architects, or whatever. From the famous, such as Dali in Figueres or Chillida in San Sebastian or Sorolla in Madrid (which, of course, was his residence, not his birthplace) to the less well-known internationally such as the Galician painters in Ourense and Pontevedra, those of the Almería school, or the Basque artists in Vittoria or Bilbao. Each town in each province seems to express a quiet, understated pride in local achievement and, crucially, devote resources to celebrate that achievement with always understated, but real pride. There may be queues of tourists in Figueres, but one often needs to seek out those galleries that display local work. One needs, for instance, to book an appointment to visit the Chillida. Also here in Salamanca, there’s an email link on the Casa-Museo website that allows a visit to be pre-arranged. One can’t just turn up to visit to the Casa-Museo Zacarías González. But do not be deterred. The appointment is easy to obtain, and the rewards are memorable.

The visitor to Salamanca will have the cathedrals, the University, the palaces and the stunningly beautiful old town on the list, not to mention the art nouveau gallery. But do not let the apparent obstacle of having to arrange a visit to this gallery deter you. Any visit to Salamanca by anyone with the slightest interest in art should include a trip to the Casa-Museo Zacarías González. You will not be disappointed.

 

Antonio Mari on show at the Sculpture Garden in Alfas del Pi

Sometimes, perhaps rarely, people have a vision. They not only see, they see through or beyond, allowing them to appreciate, often quite suddenly, a bigger space, more powerful than the immediate. Often it’s an artist that prompts such realisation. After all, it’s the artist’s role to help us see and, at the same time, to interpret. But alongside the art it’s sometimes also the setting that helps us to find an experience that lies beyond mere sight. Such a perfect blend of expression and content can be seen at the Jardin Escultorico in Alfas del Pi on Spain’s Costa Blanca, where works by Antonio Mari are on display. 

Toni Mari is a Javea-born artist who sculpts in iron. His work is often highly naturalistic, with bulls, birds, fish and sheep and other farmyard animals featuring. But it is the human form that dominates his work, despite the fact that most of his figures are often more air than substance. His figures often stride like a Bocchioni or dance like a Degas. 

Charging bulls display a life-force. A strangely light iron bird seems ready to take flight. A Good Shepherd strides, superhuman in scale, across his meadow, his joints – characteristically for Mari – twisted tendons of metal. At the hip a lunch satchel swings, no doubt crammed with the cheese of his following sheep, whose delicate fleece is soldered springs. A welded dog eagerly awaits its master’s call. A series of dancers add pure grace, their clothing and costume flowing into ribbons that do no more than punctuate their back-drop of sky. Though welded to their rusted plinths, surely they move, thus claiming their freedom of life. 

But Antonio Mari’s work is also revelatory, an aspect that is only amplified by the setting. This special exhibition sits alongside a permanent sculpture collection, amongst which are other works by the same artist. The whole is set in the beautiful gardens of the Jardin Escultorico in Alfas del Pi, on Spain’s Costa Blanca. 

Established in 1998, the gardens are the vision of Johanna Klein-Schreuder and Johannes Klein. Twelve years ago they bought a plot with some three hundred decrepit orange trees. Their unique vision was to create a sculpture garden, a space to exhibit human and natural creation both to contrast and complement. Now more than a decade into the project, Johanna and Johannes have achieved their goal. 

Their garden is worth a visit in itself. Though formally laid out, its main features are trees, themselves apparently living sculptures presenting a remarkable variety of shape and form, some in flower, some hardly yet in leaf. Interspersed between these natural forms are works of contemporary sculptors, including other works by Toni Mari, including Love Dance and Man On Stilts. In the former, angels dance a round while in the latter a perfectly formed person who has hardly any physical form seems to stride through the garden at tree-top height. 

Ausencia by Jorge Castro Flóres is a reclining figure whose very substance has been torn away. Here the reduction of the human to a kind of essence is as painful as Mari’s use of the same idea is uplifting. Elsie Ringnalda’s On Top Of You features two elongated but anonymous figures. He is lying on his back. She is upright walking towards him along his legs. Thus natural and human creativity mix, the whole producing its own life. The vision of Johanna and Johannes works beautifully with the joint focus of garden and sculpture augmenting and amplifying each other. The Jardin Escultorico is a wonderful place to visit for residents and tourists alike. And it would also repay repeated visits, since the featured exhibitions change regularly and, of course, the trees are never the same, even from one day to the next. You can visit this beautiful place at Cami del Pinar 23, Alfas del Pi. See http://www.klein-schreuder.com for further details and opening times.