When we meet someone, the first thing we look at is their face in search of the signs that distinguish it. We follow their gaze, their gestures, and we pay attention to each of their expressions. We do the same when we look at a portrait, whether in painting, photography, sculpture or film, even though we know it is a representation, an image composed by someone with a specific intention.

Traditionally, the portrait has been a means to create the image of a character and distinguish it from the rest of society. Fidelity and resemblance to the subject portrayed have been essential conditions, although the ultimate goal has always been to reflect their identity. And this is where art poses questions to us: painting, photographing, drawing... is not reproducing or revealing a "self" but creating an image. Nowadays we all portray ourselves continuously but, as Roland Barthes said, when we look at the lens of a camera we act as if we were "another." Popularly we say that the camera does not lie, but we all know that in the portrait there is something of fiction, that in reality it is a re-presentation.

The portrait has reached our days by expanding its definition. With new concepts, techniques and languages, the most recent art deploys multiple possibilities for producing images of the human condition and exploring the complex notion of identity, as well as the social implications that it entails. The works exhibited come from the "la Caixa" Collection of Contemporary Art and gathered here they return our gaze to us as a social mirror in which we ask ourselves those eternally human questions: who are they? how do I see them? who am I? how do they see me?.

Before Art was a group of artists formed in Valencia, at the end of the sixties of the last century, whose trajectory enjoys singular importance in the course that Spanish contemporary art has followed. The interest of their investigations lies in their special approach to the relationship between art and science; or, rather, in the consideration tending, in conceptual terms, to the undifferentiation of the possibilities of action between both fields of knowledge.

The proposed exhibition constitutes a retrospective look at the short, yet tremendously intense, trajectory of this artistic collective in a time of special historical significance, such as that surrounding the year 1968. Fundamentally, a considerable part of the works that made up the three main exhibitions of the group is brought together (School of Architects, Valencia, 1968; Eurocasa Gallery, Madrid, 1968; and As Gallery, Barcelona, 1969).

It is intended to reproduce, half a century later, the atmosphere of those exhibitions in which objects and mobile devices capable of generating diverse optical, perceptual and structural experiences were presented to the viewer (resorting, by the way, in many occasions, to the same physical foundations that the mass media and advertising companies of the time employed). And this is done with the dual intention of highlighting the interest and relevance of that initiative and, furthermore, to assess the influence it had on the trajectories of the participating artists.

The artist has been using photography since the early 1970s with the aim of finding other options to the dominant color in his painting: to open an investigation that neutralizes his violent use of complementary colors.

This experimental photographic practice allows him to investigate the construction, reconstruction and destruction of the image. Transformation techniques such as photography, but also printing, photocopying and collage recycling themselves and working in a spiral. Through these techniques Gordillo adopts modes of optical and constructivist art such as serialization, repetition, variants and differences between the almost identical that allow him to unfold, simultaneize and obsessively copy the same image.

Working with the negative and positive of the image, superimposed or sometimes slightly displaced, and also decomposed into the four colors of four-color printing, Gordillo converts the resulting images into "schizoid," a singular style steeped in ironic melancholy partly influenced by his long psychoanalytic practice.

Gordillo, in his collector's zeal, accumulates both banal objects from popular culture and images from the press, making a broad radiography of reality; from all of this psychedelic images emerge, sometimes close to pop.

The photographic processes carried out basically in the 1970s illuminate a way of understanding the creative process of Luis Gordillo, sometimes stranded between chance and automatism, but always disturbing where some of the artist's obsessions emerge: the encounter with absurd objects, the incoherent and endless accumulation of items he has been collecting for years. Decontextualized things and laden with plastic significance that he uses as visual material that result in psychedelic images sometimes close to pop, laden with a preset and manic humor. And this so libertarian way of making photography leads us to propose this series of works transcribed from psychoanalysis to make up the exhibition of Luis Gordillo.

Around 1980, Juana Francés abandons social criticism to venture once again into abstraction, evoking, with subtle references, comets and underwater landscapes. A kind of journey, from the depths of the sea to the sky, with the circle and rectangle as essential geometric figures. These are works on paper in which movement and color burst forth in lyrical harmony with a clear vocation for transcendence.

This path of fullness and maturity would be definitively cut short by the death of Pablo Serrano, her companion, in 1985. Juana then returns to canvases of great gestural violence and material density, dark and dramatic sidereal spaces where pain is reflected and which relate to the first informal paintings of the Alicante artist.

The title of the exhibition Esteban Vicente. Painting Must Be Poor alludes to a text written by the artist, originally in English "Painting should be poor" that speaks to us about the creative process of a work of art and the meaning of his painting. The exhibition comprises a selection of 27 works from the Permanent Collection of the Esteban Vicente Contemporary Art Museum that allows for a journey through the artist's evolution across his different creative stages.

Esteban Vicente trained in Spain, close to the postulates of the Paris School and the painter-poets of the Generation of '27. In 1936 he moved to the USA and settled in New York, joining the abstract expressionism movement. From the tangled and cluttered compositions of the early 1950s, his painting evolves, in the 1960s, toward greater prominence of forms that simultaneously order the composition. In the 1970s color completely conquers the work and he exchanges the brush for the use of the airbrush, which allows him to capture light thanks to color saturation. Esteban Vicente shows an interior landscape reduced to color, glazes and nuances, in a constant search for color and light. In the 1980s and 1990s, Esteban Vicente's painting achieves freedom; diverse organic forms reclaim nature as the main theme in large format, colors multiply, light emanates from the works, color is light.

A search for light that becomes essential also in the creation of Eusebio Sempere in this case through geometric abstraction and that is perceived in the very architectural space of the MACA. This exhibition is the result of collaboration between the Esteban Vicente Contemporary Art Museum and the Contemporary Art Museum of Alicante, kindred institutions in that they contemplate among their functions, that of promoting the programming of temporary exhibitions that complement the vision and study of contemporary art.

One of the most important lines of research in Montserrat Soto's work is the reflection on art through the spaces where it is displayed and housed. In 1997 - in Silences - the artist focuses her attention on the storage facilities of artworks in various museums, the places where art is not seen, where art rests. Subsequently, Soto undertakes the Secret Landscape project for five years, a series of photographs that captures the interiors of a collection of contemporary art collectors' homes in America and Europe. Art now becomes exclusive, accessible only to the owners and their guests in privacy. In the halls of MACA we can contemplate 13 of these photographs, belonging to the Telefónica Collection.

To carry out her project, the artist managed to slip into these homes; private spaces, inaccessible yet everyday, and far removed from the sacralization that surrounds artworks in museums. Bedrooms, living rooms, dining rooms, offices and even bathrooms are the containers of artistic works, many of them by highly sought-after authors, whose primary objective is to decorate these spaces. However, she transforms the private into the public and opens the door to an endless array of conceptual, symbolic and even psychological aspects, related to collecting. 

Painting, sculpture, photography, ethnographic objects or decorative arts populate this series of photographs of anonymous residences awaiting to provoke in the spectator, who observes surprised and even astonished, all kinds of sensations and questions: For whom is such a quantity of objects gathered? What is the objective of owning a collection? What determines the selection of purchases? Does a collector always have good taste…?

Art as self-reference from its most unknown backstage for the common of mortals becomes a symbolic radiograph of the values of contemporary society. And it builds memory that, sometimes, belongs to everyone.  
 

The 20th Century Art Collection was donated by the Alicante artist Eusebio Sempere to the city of Alicante to inaugurate the La Asegurada Museum on November 5, 1977, one of the first contemporary art museums in Spain. That was 40 years ago. Founding a museum during the democratic transition was a political act in itself: for Sempere, it was an attitude and a conviction. Donating his private collection stemmed from a profound commitment to contemporary art. It was an extremely generous act of faith that brought together the most important artistic figures that day, along with a Sempere brimming with pride, convinced of the significance of his gesture.

Today, the 20th Century Art Collection forms the cornerstone of the MACA - Museum of Contemporary Art of Alicante. An excellent collection, with an international focus, coherent and effective, it houses the finest works by the leading figures of almost every artistic movement of the 20th century. It comprises 177 works by 117 artists, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, which have been exhibited piecemeal throughout history for various reasons.

Never before has the entire collection been displayed at once. And this 40th anniversary is a fitting occasion. Occupying the Ground and First Floors, we can discover the immense importance of this 20th Century Art Collection. The 177 pieces, the 117 artists, share the same objective as its founder: to facilitate public access to contemporary art.

As the third exhibition in the series "Every Landscape is Fiction," the work of Ángeles Marco is presented, one of the main figures responsible for the renewal of the Spanish sculpture landscape since the 1980s. She belonged to that generation that transformed sculptural art and was called the New Spanish Sculpture alongside artists such as Juan Muñoz, Jaume Plensa, Susana Solano, Eva Lootz, Miquel Navarro, Cristina Iglesias, Txomin Badiola, Pello Irazu, Sergi Aguilar, etc.

Minimalism, constructivism, and conceptual art are some of the influences that can be traced in her installations and sculptures, grouped in series that address different metaphors and to which the artist returns again and again. She employs iron preferentially and occasionally other materials such as rubber, wax, or glass. Feelings of solitude and anguish give life to her pieces and installations, endowed with a particular narrative sense.

The series "Leap into the Void" and "The Transit" is one of the most representative of the Valencian artist and defines her experimental character. The artist adopts treatments and resources from different techniques, directly transferred from the world of industrial engineering to sculptural practice. She mastered the craft technically in order to dedicate herself to artistic research. "Leap into the Void" is the stance that Ángeles Marco adopts in the face of reality. Her anguish is literally a sensation of infinite freedom in space. Her "leaps into the void" are a consequence of that vertigo of freedom. Anguish is the continued presence of nothingness: the cold sweat of standing at the edge of a window, the joyous terror of the fall.

"The Transit" is the second recurring theme of the artist. The passage from one place to another, from one stage to another. They are images of corridors, bridges, stairs, passages, alleys… But also the transit from one chemical state to another or, even, the camouflage that seeks to make a presence invisible. Transition as a shiver, a movement from darkness to darkness.

This exhibition showcases a selection of works from the Mediterranean Foundation Collection that is deposited in this Museum of Contemporary Art in Alicante thanks to the agreement signed between the City Council of Alicante and the Mediterranean Foundation.

The Mediterranean Foundation Collection consists of 212 pieces and covers the work of 125 artists, the most essential names in the contemporary Spanish art scene. It spans a chronological arc that runs from the democratic transition to the present day: an artistic period in Spain that corresponds to the last 40 years, so generous, filled with hope, energy, disenchantment, excess and naivety… but also with reflection, denunciation, commitment, adventure… A period in which several generations of artists coexist in a normalized way as had never happened before, enriching each other mutually, with the younger artists learning from the undisputed masters, and rediscovering in the younger generation the persistence of what is essential.

With time 3… wants to reflect on the contemporaneity of the works shown, beyond the historical references already known in the 20th Century Art Collection and what is to come. References that are linked to gesture and matter where the work is the process in a continuous search for the purest painting, the one that represents itself. But also with a generation of artists who will deeply review reality to address figuration from a thousand points of view. Or with the most essential ones, those who deal directly with the sublime in a stripping away of everything to find spirituality, the hidden breath of beauty.

Every Landscape is Fiction 2 is a proposal for deepening the theme of landscape. If this first selection had the natural world as a reference for landscape, this second edition wants to show through a single piece and a single artist, Miquel Navarro, the world of the urban as a construction of contemporary landscape.

It is one of the most significant cities for the Valencian artist due to the dimension and presence that this Battle Space acquires. It was presented for the first time in 2002 at the Marlborough gallery in New York with great critical and public success. It was the artist's first individual exhibition in the New York capital and in it he wanted to pay homage to the city after the brutal attack on the Twin Towers on September 11. The center of the exhibition was this installation, Battle Space, composed of a series of aluminum and zinc sculptures of various forms and sizes that resemble a fantastic miniature city, half city, half cemetery. Navarro proposes that we perceive the city from above, like a tracking shot, on a scale that turns man into a giant.

The installation, fifteen meters long, seven meters wide, and two meters high, is composed of several series of geometric figures of small dimensions, organized in the form of blocks of houses, which could also be polished tombstones arranged in series in a cemetery. And it is completed with some large-scale elements that resemble New York skyscrapers. Approximately 2,500 pieces in total that, in rigorous arrangement, extend forming pure poetic creation between archaeology and modernity, a metaphor for destroyed civilization.