VALENCIA.- The Chirivella Soriano Foundation hosts an exhibition which, titled Blanco / Negro: sujeto, espacio, perception (White/Black: Subject, space, perception), pretends to review the dual chromatic existence between white and black and its conceptual and thematic relation in contemporary Spanish paintings.

This exhibition takes as its basis 30 works of art from the Chirivella Soriano Collection andi s complemented by four others, on loan from other private collections, with the purpose of showing how an elements like color, in the history of Spanish painting in the second half of the XX Century, articulated the debate between two generations: the myth of España Negra (Black Spain), recreated by the informalists and the colorful magma of the 80´s generation, fitting these divergences between color and no color as two states of mind in one country at different historical moments.

According to Manuel Chirivella, president of the foundation, the exhibition pretends to get the visitor closer to the divergences of color and no color in which art has been involved, as well as the thematic associations that go from the painters of Black Spain from the El Paso Group until the most recent Spanish paintings that use White and Black, in an explicit or implicit manner, to articulate determined aesthetic, moral or thematic dialogues.

The exhibition is divided into four sections. It starts off with white present in works by Fernando Zóbel, Carmen Calvo and Elena Asins, the shadow or monster in the works by Antonio Saura, Darío Villalba, Chema López and Santiago Ydáñez. The third section, black and white as an irreconcilable system, which on many occasions materializes in opposites such as love and death, as in the work by Manuel Millares, Xisco Mensua or Andrés Cillero. The fourth and last section, dedicated to those artists who conceive this duality as a conscious and harmonic structure that goes from the musical combinations by Manuel Barbadillo to the black and white of Eduard Arbós which tries to use divergent perceptions in the space that derive from these two extreme and contrasting colors.

White/Black: Subject, space, perception has been curated by Joan Robledo, who explained that “In our country there have been very few exhibitions that have centered themselves in attempting to explain the use of color in the 20th Century, and none that have tried to approach the black and white through these Spanish artists.