That which (perhaps) does not touch

When Picasso showed friends and colleagues his latest work, everyone, without exception, mocked and ridiculed it. They even dared to say that the scene represented a brothel in the south of France run by the mother of the friend and poet Max Jacob... It was Les señoretes d'Avignon (1907). Picasso put it in the closet, showed it once at an exhibition, and eventually it was acquired somewhat secretly. Today it is the star of the most emblematic museum of the 20th century, the MoMA in New York.

Carlos Pazos emerged as an artist not long ago at the same time that my friends, in the school yard, were laughing like crazy while exclaiming: "What a doleeeent joke!" That is, when the bad taste, if it was very, very bad taste, passed to the other side of the spectrum and became acceptable. This change of paradigm is the basis of the work of Carlos Pazos and, especially, of his latest proposal: a survey on taste titled in English and with the question: "Bad painting?"

With the collaboration of the essayist Eloy Fernández Porta, Carlos Manuel Pazos Moya gathers his work, work by other hands belonging to the PazosCuchillo collection and even pieces borrowed from the sancta sanctorumíssimo MNAC (note, Àlex Susanna, with borrow the sacred fire of the gods, who sees how Prometheus ended...).

The project, we won't deny that it's juicy, embraces works made by pelacanyes and patums between 1850 and 1950, chosen with stinging bad faith... at the same time that it stirs the bowels of concepts such as good taste and bad taste, carrincloneria - the Catalan equivalent of the cheesy coined by Ramón Gómez de la Serna–, sublimity, scoundrel or camp .

In front of the works, beyond the theoretical proposal, we will feel at the same time ashamed and in love, excited to love something that also seems inadmissible aesthetically or ethically. You know, if there are no contradictions in a story, it is false or incomplete.

It happens to me with the pictures of clowns playing the violin, horses running on a beach under the moon, listening to a sax player playing Petite fleur , reviewing for the umpteenth time Al este del oeste (1984), a monumental bulldozer by Esteso and the Ozores... You won't find anything like that in the proposal that, bravely, hosts the Can Framis Museum of the Vila Casas Foundation, but you will guess there are dogs about to drown in a kind of universal deluge , still lifes devoted to sausage with beans, works created on a bad day by renowned painters such as Aleix Clapés or Joan Brull, and even oils that I personally love but, wherever you go, are subjected to the border scrutiny of the proposal, like a burial of Marià Pidelaserra or two skiers of Pere Pruna.

As for Pazos' work, we don't know if it's steak or potatoes in this combined dish, it still gives me that nervous laugh I started in the school yard: "Look how bad it is!" (applause).