Horta, Picasso, Miró, Mont-roig

Often the character of a landscape has directly influenced the work of an artist. Let's think, for example, of the mountain of Sainte-Victoire, in the Ais de Provence area, which had such an impact on the work of Paul Cézanne. In the same way, Horta de Sant Joan and Mont-roig del Camp have become, over time, synonymous with Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, two great artists closely linked to two landscapes.

Each one his own, so personal, so own and at the same time so universal. Both painters based their work - at least for a few years - on a territory that, passed through the filter of their gaze, took on decisive plastic qualities for their artistic itineraries. The photographer Jean Marie del Moral (Montoire-sur-le-Loir, 1952), who has often been interested in the careers of both artists, is now delving into the orography of the Baix Camp and the Terres de l'Ebre through the Horta-Picasso exhibition. Miró-Mont-roig Photographs by Jean Marie del Moral, organized by the Palau i Fabre Foundation of Caldes d'Estrac.

The exhibition, curated by Manuel Guerrero, establishes dialogues between these two Catalan landscapes that revolutionized the world of universal art. From localism, Miró and Picasso knew how to break molds and widen horizons, create new languages that marked a before and an after in Western plastic creation. In 1908, Picasso allowed himself to be seduced by the red lands of Horta in the same way that Miró was seduced by the reddish landscapes of Mont-roig del Camp, where he spent his summers around 1918.

Despite the eighty kilometers that separate one place from the other, Jean Marie del Moral has been able to find points of union there, as if two of the most relevant artists of the 20th century were connected by similar sources of inspiration. It is not the first time that the photographer is interested in the figures of Miró and Picasso. At the end of the seventies he had already photographed Joan Miró with the intention of including the snapshots in a feature film dedicated to the Spanish intelligentsia after the end of the dictatorship. Years later, at the beginning of the nineties, he also worked around the figure of Picasso, with the documentary Picasso and bullfighting, which followed in the wake of creations around the artists' creative process, which include photographs of Motherwell, Antoni Tàpies, Miquel Barceló or Lichtenstein, among others.

With this exhibition, which can be visited until September 24, the two great geniuses of painting cross paths again and converge in the rooms of the Palau Foundation.