February 20 – July 7, 09
Throughout the world, the use of masks usually involves invoking spirits, mediation between the spiritual and the real, something common to different ages and different civilisations, reaching as far back as the use of masks in Greek tragedies. Furthermore, they are usually used in rites in which the body and mind undergo a kind of catharsis full of images similar to subconscious experiences during dreams; such objects are therefore of great interest to surrealists.
The selection of items on display here from the Granell Foundations ethnic collection is mostly made up of masks used in traditional rites in different Latin American countries, along with a small selection of traditional Mexican craftwork called trees of life.
The presence of masks in the Granell Foundations ethnic art collection, made up of different kinds of traditional artwork (traditional religious art, objects used in pagan festivities, toys
) from America, Africa and Europe, is especially significant. As a plastic artist and intellectual influenced by the first historical vanguards, Eugenio Granell had a special interest in masks. Granell, in fact, began painting flat Indian masks in the forties, fascinated by the real masks he came across and acquired during his long exile throughout the American continent. Masks, along with other traditional art objects that Granell gradually collected, eventually formed a substantial part of his domestic and intimate universe, often becoming a fruitful source of inspiration for his plastic work. Occasionally, some of these objects even slipped their real face into Granells work. A significant example of this internalisation of objects is the series of photographs made by Eugenio Granell in 1952, Moro muza andrógino, based on the poetical perception that the artist applied to a series of Guatemalan masks (used in Danza de la Conquista) described as Moorish masks. The masks used in this work, along with similar ones, make up the largest group of items on display. Eugenio Granells ethnic art collection, avoiding the academic systematisation used in conventional anthropological collections, grew in harmony with the attraction he felt for traditional culture in the places where he lived or visited.
The collection reflects the interest of a surrealist intellectual and artist in reviving and being inspired by the profound and direct gesture of traditional art, of the purity of spirit found in the ancestral primitivism at the root of all the worlds cultures.
In addition to the encounter and coexistence with objects of traditional American art, in Granells surrealist map of the world, African art also occupies a prominent place, as does the art of or for the primitivist we all have inside, the child: toys.
