Cult and committed, coherent yet contradictory, controversial and respected, controversial and anti-gregarious, radical and incorruptible, detail-oriented and meticulous, awkward and fearsome, irreverent and anti-clerical, scathing and acid... These adjectives and many more have been used to define the multifaceted personality of Feliu Elias, protagonist of the exhibition Reality as an Obsession , curated by Mariàngels Fondevila and Mariona Seguranyes at the MNAC.
Internationally recognized for its inclusion in the exhibition Les realismes 1919-1939 at the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1981 or recently at the Guggenheim in Bilbao in the exhibition Chaos and Classicism. Art in France, Italy, Germany and Spain 1918-1936 , Feliu Elias is currently an author little known to the general public, despite the fact that in 1986 he was the subject of a large monographic exhibition at the former Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona , in the Citadel.
The current exhibition represents a new reading of the work of Feliu Elias and is structured in three large areas representative of the three identities of this multifaceted character.
The exhibition begins with an area entitled Apa, an incisive look , focused on the work of the illustrator who signed with the name Apa. Founder of Papitu magazine, he also published in L'Esquella de la Torratxa or La Campana de Gràcia and ¡Cu-Cut! , from where he was expelled for having criticized the Regionalist League in his jokes. The visitor discovers an excellent cartoonist who goes beyond the limits of what is politically correct and exhibits a caustic humor and is furious with anything that involves an abuse of any form of power or authority.
The second area is entitled The Painter of the Stopped Life . Here we are presented with a hyper-detailed artist, defender of realism, fond of dealing with subjects taken from the immediate environment but who puts a lot of energy into the way he approaches them. Elias uses minuscule divisionism, which reminds us of Nonell's work. Reflections, mirrors, transparencies are combined with very calculated disproportions of elements and end up generating pieces with a conceptual background that goes far beyond the simple objective reproduction of what surrounds it.
The third area, under the title Connections and collisions , addresses his dimension as an intellectual, remarkable art historian and critic who signed with the pseudonym Joan Sacs and who from Revista Nova expressed his fascination for impressionism, he defended realism and attacked vanguardists like Picasso, Dalí or Miró in a devastating way. Their philias and phobias serve as an excuse to make an anthological display of a set of representative works by artists of the time who received Feliu Elias' criticism, whether positive, negative or changing.
The exhibition represents an important step in the dissemination and recognition of an essential figure in Catalan art of the first half of the 20th century.
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