The municipal delegate of Culture, Susana Rivas, the deputy mayor, Roberto Palmero, and the director of the Museum of Chiclana, Jesus Romero, have presented two exhibitions that come together in the same space. It is 'Gessa, sum and follows. New acquisitions' and 'Another woman who painted other flowers. Carmen Espel', which will be open to the public until September 3, under a common theme such as floral painting. Gessa's way of approaching the subject, almost botanical, and Espel's treatment, which almost borders on fantasy when it comes to approaching them.
"We had been thinking for some time about how to contextualize this exhibition, because it is an exhibition that will be liked since it conveys a lot of joy. We wanted to contextualize all the work of Gessa and the legacy he left to his disciples, with one of the artists who best portrayed the flowers, as is the case of Carmen Espel," said the delegate, inviting "all citizens to visit this exhibition, because they will have the opportunity to enjoy the work of a Chiclana and one of his disciples."
The Museum of Chiclana permanently exhibits works by Sebastian Gessa Arias, the most important painter of Chiclana in the nineteenth century along with Juan Antonio Gonzalez. On this occasion, the Museum returns temporarily on this painter to show the public several paintings that, although already part of the artistic heritage of Chiclana, have not yet been enjoyed by the public. For it has been, quietly and steadily, the work of the Museum to continue to increase the funds of the same with pieces of Sebastian Gessa or somehow refer to his work, a work in which we distinguish two fundamental aspects, which are his own plastic work and his teaching.
Of his plastic work, four of his oil paintings acquired in the last few years are presented for the first time in public, and which have previously undergone a process of cleaning and fine-tuning before their public appearance. Among these four works, the largest and most complex composition present in Chiclana.
"Gessa, painter of flowers as he was called, was also a teacher of painters who found in Gessa a first class teacher and who reached height and renown. The teaching of Gessa Arias is present here in pieces of his students who have also acquired in recent times the Museum of Chiclana, among these pieces an interesting still life of Julia Alcayde never before exposed in public", explained the director of the Museum.
On the other hand, "Another woman who painted other flowers. Carmen Espel", comes to be the colorful and fresh exhibition of the summer at the Museum of Chiclana.
Carmen Espel (Barcelona, 1926-2017) turned to drawing as a result of an illness that confined her at home. She was nine years old at the time, and drawing was a window through which to breathe. Carmen's talent became evident to her father, a man well connected to the cultural and artistic world, and soon the incipient artist was able to orient her vocation through these contacts.
Small, restless, outgoing, stubborn and persevering, she soon expressed her firm decision to devote herself to painting. In 1940, she convinces her father to attend, against the customary for a young girl, the workshop of Armand Miravalls Bové. However, the decisive discovery was the meeting with the painter Ramon Sanvisens, in whose school she began to work in oils.
An eminently colorist painter, Sanvisens will be key in the evolution of the very personal painting of Carmen Espel who, although she deals with other themes, will soon triumph with her floral still lifes, a subject treated by so many other painters but here, and so, only hers.
Two looks on the same subject, whose fruits can be contemplated in the Museum of Chiclana, along with the rest of its summer exhibition offer.
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