Exhibitions
Genia Chef and Don Quixote: alchemy of a myth, geography of a soul
A pictorial journey to the MEAM between matter and dream, where Don Quixote is reborn as a contemporary myth in the work of Genia Chef.
There are artists who paint pictures. And there are others who paint worlds. Genia Chef belongs to this second lineage: creators who, with every gesture, with every stain, with every stroke, open up a territory where literature, memory and matter merge until they become one.
For years, Chef has been in dialogue with one of the most inexhaustible figures in the universal imagination: Don Quixote of La Mancha. Not as a character, but as a living force. As a metaphor for a humanity that insists on dreaming despite the weight of the world, that fights against mills knowing that they may be giants, but also knowing that without giants there would be no epic. This entire universe can now be seen with ¡Viva Don Quixote! At the MEAM until April 26.
In Genia Chef's monumental canvases, Don Quixote does not just ride across La Mancha: he crosses inner deserts, constellations of pigments and invisible maps of the soul. The pictorial space expands to touch an almost metaphysical dimension, where painting and graphic art cease to be separate disciplines and merge into a single creative breath.
Chef unites the ancient wisdom of the old masters with the radical freedom of contemporary gesture. He dilutes the oil with liquid amber as if summoning spirits of the past, and confronts it with unusual mixtures of wine, olive oil and juices from the Spanish soil, in a kind of alchemical cuisine where the painting is prepared like a sacred dish destined to be shared with the viewer.
His pictorial surfaces recall ancient skins, withered by time, like tapestries hung in medieval castles where the echo of forgotten deeds still resonates. Networks of tonal transitions extend like dusty roads, evoking the infinite horizon of La Mancha, while chromatic fluids circulate like anthropomorphic capillaries, connecting matter with thought, landscape with the creative brain.
These paths are not just geographical: they are itineraries of the imagination. Each stroke is a footprint, each stain a memory, each crack an open question about the meaning of struggle, of the ideal and of failure. When Chef draws, he does not do it only with a brush. He does it with bird feathers, with ink that seems to spring directly from the Cervantes story, with charcoal that leaves visible the process, the wound, the trial and error. The underlying drawing is not hidden: it breathes under the paint like a beating heart, reminding us that every work is a path, not a certainty.
Carefully crafted figures coexist with sketched shapes, as if Don Quixote and Sancho appeared and disappeared in a poetic fog, trapped between dream and reality, between irony and tragedy.
In Genia Chef's work, Don Quixote ceases to be just literature to become a physical, visual and emotional experience. The myth is reactivated, it becomes flesh, texture and light. It challenges us from the immensity of its canvases and invites us to look at ourselves: what are our mills, what are our utopias, what is our way of resisting.
Thus, between pigments, amber and memory, Genia Chef does not illustrate Cervantes: she reinvents him. And in doing so, she reminds us that art —like Don Quixote— is an act of radical courage, a poetic gesture against oblivion, a stubborn way of continuing to believe that the world can still be transformed by the power of imagination.
