"Bad Painting?", a project by Carlos Pazos in Can Framis

The Vila Casas Foundation presents in its space Can Framis Bad Painting?, a project by Carlos Pazos that can be seen from January 7 to June 4, 2023 and which has had the complicity of the essayist Eloy Fernández Porta. An exhibition that reflects on the questions surrounding the term bad painting and that invites us to question the criteria of taste.

Bad Painting? it is also the result of an unusual collaboration between several institutions: the National Museum, where most of the paintings come from; the PazosCuchillo collection, mb based in Trasanquelos (A Coruña) which has contributed some others; and Vila Casas, without forgetting the Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona, which served as a source of inspiration for the assembly.

This exhibition project presents a unique combination of works created between 1850 and 1950 by very diverse artists, mostly Catalan. Some, renowned; others are little remembered, and the unknown are also present. Are they all bona fide paintings? Are the taste criteria with which they were developed still valid today? Carlos Pazos and Eloy Fernández Porta, who have made the selection, invite us, in a humorous and witty way, to reconsider the ideas we have acquired about pictorial value, effect and quality.

The Vila Casas Foundation thus becomes the scene of an inquisition on the History of Art and, who knows, maybe even an aesthetic crime... The term bad painting raises all kinds of questions. Curator Marcia Tucker coined it in the exhibition held at the New York gallery The New Museum (1978), where she brought together works that challenged "virtuosity, material selection, execution or illusionism". In a later inflection, made by Eva Badura-Triska and Susanne Neuburger at the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK) in Vienna (2008), it was argued that “good taste leads to impotence”. Between these two proposals, the inauguration in 1993 of the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA), in Boston (USA), marked the consolidation of the trend.