Exhibitions
Ona Balló restores the resonant soul of Romanesque art at the MNAC
The reverse journey. A sound fresco of the Romanesque, presented at the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC) from November 13, 2026, to April 30, 2027, proposes a sensory experience that recovers, through the sounds of the Pyrenees, the original atmosphere of the Romanesque mural paintings separated from the churches for which they were created.
For eight centuries, the Romanesque mural paintings of the Pyrenees were part of the life of the churches that housed them. Integrated into these spaces of worship, linked to faith, imagination and transcendence, they coexisted with a lively and changing exterior landscape. The visual universe of the apses and naves thus maintained a close relationship with the surroundings, with the rhythms of nature and with the sounds that shaped the daily life of those territories.
The removal and transfer of these paintings to the MNAC ensured their preservation, but also involved a break with the context that had given them meaning. Separated from their original architectures, the images lost part of their environmental and popular dimension. The balance between the symbolic and the earthly universe, between the visual and the sonic, was interrupted, and the paintings became objects to be contemplated as autonomous works, detached from a much broader experience.
Master of the Last Judgment. 'Wolf chasing a gazelle from Santa Maria de Taüll', second quarter of the 12th century. ©National Art Museum of Catalonia.
With this intervention, Ona Balló, artist and curator, proposes an approach that seeks to recover, even if only evocatively, this lost dimension. The project extends through the Romanesque art rooms of the museum and introduces a sound composition built from the sounds that still inhabit the churches and valleys of the Pyrenees today. The acoustic landscape unfolds among the apses of Santa Maria d’Àneu, Sant Pere del Burgal, Sant Pere and Sant Pau d’Esterri de Cardós, Santa Maria de Ginestarre, Santa Maria de Taüll and Santa Eulàlia d’Estaon.
The project traces a path opposite to that of the paintings: if these left their original locations to find refuge in the museum, now it is the sounds of the territory that enter it to symbolically restore part of that link. It is not about literally reconstructing the past, but about bringing into the present what cannot be removed or transferred: the atmosphere, the acoustic memory, and the deep relationship between the images and their environment.
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