Exhibition

Alliberar Xavier Nogués

28 April, 2022 - 29 July, 2022

What if we free Xavier Nogués, even momentarily, from the position in which his most relevant interpreters have placed him? Not to wholesale challenge his contributions, but to ask ourselves questions from our contemporaneity that previous authors did not ask, because they could not or because they did not want to. And this with a first objective: to check whether the work—I emphasize the work—of Nogués takes paths different from those through which we usually place it in the history of Catalan art of the 20th century. It is about applying a virginal look to Nogués’s career or, at least, as least contaminated as possible by the readings or topics with which he has come to us at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century.

Risky job? I don’t believe it. It is about keeping an open eye on all the artist’s works and corroborating (or not, of course) a feeling: that we have missed nuances of a Nogués that has been somehow encapsulated and, consequently, who knows if impoverished. One of the first registers that I will address immediately is his ascription to noucentisme, which has been in my opinion one of the depth charges that have prevented a fresh reading of most of the artist’s works. Wasn’t he a Noucentista artist? I think the answer to this question is essential. And this answer, today, cannot come from what Feliu Elias, Francesc Pujols, Rafael Benet, his first critics, said all those years ago, or all those who subsequently wanted to appropriate him to a cause, the Noucentista, so imprecise in the artistic level and so contaminated on the ideological level.

Joan Maria Minguet Batllori

Catàleg Alliberar Xavier Nogués 2.45 MB