Opinion
Aura, myth and expression: From Sucre to Vilacasas
To the writer, critic, cartoonist, lecturer, agitator, friend of artists and the arts, a decadent character all in all: finally, a juicy and well-organized exhibition by Joan Gil and Aitor Quiney is dedicated to Josep Maria de Sucre. With rarely seen pieces, well spaced and intertwined, with little-tried documentation, dedicated to one of the great invisible figures of those dark years: the one who, with his tanned, trembling and precarious hand, made so many things possible (the trips to Paris by Tàpies & co) and expressed so many others, ineffable wonders.
Perhaps because so many artists admired his aura as a resistant avant-garde artist, almost all of them passed by his decrepit tower in the Gràcia neighborhood, where De Sucre, without ever having learned any trace of art, chalked atavistic and frightening figures with pastels, evolved faces of Munch or Rouault, passed through the sieve of primitivism and post-war mud. Papers that he gave to artists of multiple generations until his death in 69 (I have still seen some in the workshops of Sebastià Ramis or Arranz-Bravo): in fact, an exhibition could be held only with the De Sucres collected by artists, who admired him for the indifferent infantilism of his strokes.
Now: not all of De Sucre lives up to the character's myth (because the aura that is amplified in the film that is broadcast by Joan Francesc de Lasa is enough to make you shut up); because there is a high percentage of work that is swarming through auctions and collections that are not; but thus, with the entire exhibition, it is demonstrated that De Sucre, well-exposed (the works of the Generalitat are still wonderful: and on par with Bassat, Granollers or Valls), can be assembled a vibrant body of work that claims him as an indispensable hinge artist to explain the aesthetic atmosphere of a few years colored by the coordinates of magic, tragic expressiveness, naivety or mystery.
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