When we talk about an anecdote in 19th-century painting, we refer to human figures, cattle or even the smoke of a chimney that appears in a painting. In the work of the painters of the l’Escola d’Olot, the landscape was not autonomous, the presence and anthropocentric vision was dominant. It took the painter Joaquim Vayreda a lifetime to be able to free himself from the ‘anecdote’ and to paint landscapes without these elements that revealed human presence.
This exhibition proposes to disfocus the anecdote in these paintings where the instrumentalization of the landscape was and is relevant. Based on the vision explored in the company of the l’Observatori del Paisatge – organism located in the same building as the Museu de La Garrotxa – we propose a choral rereading focused on the painting l’estiu, by Joaquim Vayreda.
As the geographer Joan Nogué writes, “the landscape is simultaneously significant and meaning, continent and content, reality and fiction”. We are thus approaching a perceptive dimension that invites us to take a turn and speculate new narratives that allow us to “reenchant the world so that it returns to collect its agency”, as Edu Rubio and Blanca Arias narrate, within the central videographic piece of this exhibition.
An invitation to reorient ourselves from the call and its echo, proposing more horizontal views, where the anecdote is revealed through the subjectivity of color, landscape and the construction of images.
