VALENCIA.- The director of the IVAM, Consuelo Ciscar, Ageval director general, Enrique Perez Boada, corporate sponsor of the exhibition and the curators of the show, Aida Pons Moreno and Francisco Javier Perez Rojas, have presented the exhibition "Pinazo and the Watercolor ", which opens to the public at 20.00 hours today and can be visited until the next May 23.

Within the frame of the exhibitions being organized by the IVAM in order to show different approaches of Ignacio Pinazo's work (1849-1916), "Pinazo y la Acuarela" [Pinazo and watercolor] will be the first exhibition to thoroughly study the technique aspects of his work, which have been scarcely taken into account in the former analyses dedicated to the artist. The exhibition, which gathers together more than 60 artworks, most of them unedited, includes some examples of Picazo's early work regarding the washing technique or the drawings with only one colored ink. Thus, the evolution of the Valencian artist as regards watercolor can be traced, from the incipient incursions where Baroque patterns are observed, to the highest purity of his watercolors.

The exhibition is divided in: religious affairs, academies and nudes, Goyesque history, Italian views and faces, musketeer portraits, regional figures and rural scenes, African topics and studies of flowers, animals or architecture.

In the occasion of the exhibition a catalog of the exhibited works has been published. Texts by the museum director, Consuelo Ciscar, and the exhibition curators, Francisco Javier Pérez Rojas and Aida Pons Moreno, have also been included.

Watercolor in Spain did not have a solid tradition, as it was scarcely used on the elaboration of the so called "serious" painting, which required oil painting techniques, whereas watercolor was usually employed on the drafts of the definitive works. In spite of that, watercolor has been increasingly valued and admired in Valencia since the end of the 19th century, both by the artists and the experts, who where able to understand the difficulties of this technique.

Pinazo felt soon interested in watercolor, as it enabled him to face color composition by adopting a more feasible an experimental approach. Some of the watercolors are dated from 1870, which was significant for his personality formation as an artist. He started painting animals and inhabitants form the Valencian vegetable garden [huertanos] in watercolors and washings, as in sketches and assorted studies. Pinazo, as other outstanding artists did, raised on his ink watercolor and washing paintings the same topics he reproduced on his oil paintings. Moreover, he combined his oil paintings with this water-based works. Usually, he preferred watercolors for non-assigned artworks, drafts, sketches and preparatory studies. Though synthesis painting and the small format had always matched with watercolor, that was, undoubtedly, one of the permanent artistic resources of the Valencian master.

For that very reason, Ignacio Pinazo could be considered as one of the best icons of local watercolor, and not only as the example of painter that was able to master water-based on paper techniques. Therefore Picazo, together with other Valencian artists and international figures, such as Mariano Fortuny, contributed to enhance Spanish watercolor, putting it on the level with other techniques, which lead to a new height of Spanish watercolor, that causing the spring of new Associations, Academies and a considerable growth of enthusiastic developers of such technique.