Cabinet

Paper in Western art is particularly linked to the concept of drawing, a discipline at once simple and extraordinarily complex. With great economy of means, drawing allows artists to register whatever ticks in his or her head with the accuracy of a seismometer, as well as to depict the most objective representation of the visible world.

This room holds a selection of works on paper from the DKV and Fundación Juan March collections. Chronologically, the earliest is one of the museum´s works, Personnage du chat (1952) by Joan Ponç, a peculiar artist and illustrator linked to the movement surrounding the magazine Dau al Set. Rooted in Surrealism and psichoanalysis, this work depicts a totemic character, seemingly carved on a tree trunk, who holds or perhaps nurses a a feline figure: a strange maternity, wounded and deranged.

This is accompanied by drawings featuring human, humanoid and animal figures that are more or less recogniseable, such as those by Juan José Martín, Ernesto Casero, Chema López, Joël Mestre, Almudena Lobera and Alfredo Alcaín. In the engravings of Gerardo Aparicio, a multitude of whimsical figures arranged in horizontal stripes perhaps alludes to a collector’s compulsion, or to display cases in a museum. In the case of Moisés Mahiques, instead, the figure is a nervous, gestual scribble, which connects his drawings to those by artsits of previous generations such as Luis Feito or Miguel Ángel Campano. They all share space in this imaginary collector’s cabinet with a drawing by Juan Antonio Aguirre, inspired in Eastern Asian art, and a textural experiment by Daniel Argimón, a drawing in which the battered support becomes the subject. Another resource, the use of grids, fits into languages as diverse as those of Laura González Cabrera, with Constructivist notes, and Luis Gordillo, inspired by Cubism. Other draftsmen focus on landscape: industrial landscapes such as those by Antonio Alcaraz, a nostalic evokation of the built environment in the drawings of Juan Cuéllar, and architecture that is barely hinted at in the work of Mitsuo Miura, or symbolic, turned into floorplans or flat shapes in the work of José Miguel Pereñíguez.