Apelles Fenosa and Jean Genet

With the exhibition 'Intersections around Jean Genet', the Fundació Apel·les Fenosa explores the interconnections between the worlds of art and literature. The exhibition, curated by Juan-Ramón Barbancho, constitutes the first case study of the cycle 'Fenosa and the writers' and takes as its central axis the bust of Jean Genet, modeled by Fenosa in Paris in 1950 by order of Monique Lange. This sculptural piece serves as a starting point to delve into Fenosa's links with the literary circle that surrounded the writer.

Open to the public until February 23, the exhibition presents an intersecting narrative where Fenosa, Genet, Lange, as well as other figures such as Víctor Viladrich and Juan Goytisolo, are intertwined in a story of encounters and correspondence between Barcelona and Paris. This cultural environment of the 1950s becomes the scene of collaborations that reveal little-known aspects of these figures. According to Barbancho's research, the bust, with its sharp features and withdrawn expression, embodies the many sides of Genet's personality, which oscillates between introspection and provocation. Thus, the sculpture captures the essence of an enigmatic character, in an artistic process that Barbancho, with the collaboration of the Institut Français de Barcelona, the Jaimes Bookstore and the Filmoteca de Catalunya, has documented through archives, letters and unpublished photographs.

Nekane Aramburu, director of the Apel·les Fenosa Foundation, highlights the importance of preserving Fenosa's work in a cultural context that, despite advancing technologically, is at a crossroads where the tactile and direct conservation of heritage remains essential . In this sense, the spaces of the Foundation have been redesigned as research and creation centers, which turn the rooms into interactive study and exhibition hubs, allocating part of the building to the archive and research in order to create a living continuity between the past, the present and the future.

The Foundation's 'Case Studies' program, to which this exhibition belongs, seeks new interpretations of Fenosa's work through the detailed analysis of specific pieces. Fenosa, who during her life maintained a deep relationship with several writers, engaged in long conversations with them, encounters that were often immortalized in texts, portraits and correspondence . Preserved photographs and correspondence allow us to sense these moments of intellectual complicity, although their emotional complexity often remains unexplored. Unlike a conventional biography, Barbancho's research aims to understand the subtleties that defined these relationships and expose a wider dialogue about the relationship that was established between them.