The artist Francesc Torres, through his gaze, turns the Oval Room into a stage where life and death unfold. An unprecedented and risky montage to interrogate about the voluntary decision to sacrifice for the defense of an ideal. Aeronautics (flight) Interior originates from a visit by the artist to the historic La Sénia Aviation Field, very close to where the Sénia Historic Aviation Center (CAHS) is currently located.
“In one way or another, everything religious, ideological, political, national or identity is based on a management of life and death, by the factual power, of the individuals that make up the social body of these categories. Only what justifies the giving of life is important, the clearest and simplest way of defining the sacred, whether divine or not. "
Francesc Torres
The intervention, directed by Pepe Serra, raises an analogy with the saints martyred for their religious faith, based on the iconography borrowed from the Crucifixion of Saint Peter, a Gothic panel from the MNAC collection. This parallel raises the question: how far would we be able to go in defense of our ideals?
With the desire to rethink the past from the present, the Museum allocates an iconic space of its facilities to commemorate a sensitive and transcendental episode in Spanish history.
Description of project by Francesc Torres
The artist Francesc Torres turns the Sala Oval into a stage where life and death unfold. Two 1: 1 scale replicas of two Soviet planes that fought in the Civil War put space in tension: a Tupolev SB-2 “Katiuska” bomber, about to crash, and the Polikárpov I-16 “Mosca” fighter. An unpublished and risky montage to reflect on the act of dying for an ideal.
The proposal explores the impact of death that comes from heaven in war conflicts and the voluntary decision to sacrifice for the defense of an ideal. He does so by raising an analogy with the saints martyred for their religious faith, based on the borrowed iconography of the Crucifixion of Saint Peter, a beautiful Gothic panel from the collection of the National Museum of master Pere Serra (14th century). This parallel, precisely in the era in which social networks easily serve as a loudspeaker for our ideals, raises the following question: how far would we be able to go in defense of our ideals?
Aeronautics (flight) Interior originates from a visit by the artist to the historic La Sénia Aviation Field, very close to where the Historic Aviation Center is currently located, whose director, José Ramón Bellaubí Cavaller, carries out the epic recreation of real scale of historical airplanes. From here arises a monumental artistic installation with which Francesc Torres takes even further some coordinates that he had already explored on other occasions: the ambiguity between art and non-art, and the elimination of the dividing line between "exhibition", "work of art ”and“ installation ”. And it is that, in the words of the artist, "an airplane that does not fly is not an airplane, it is a work of art".
With the desire to rethink the past from the present, and within the framework of the exhibition projects that the National Museum dedicates this year to the Civil War, art, conflict and memory, the Museum allocates an iconic space of
its facilities to commemorate a sensitive and momentous episode in our recent history. Francesc Torres, through his gaze, uses art to stir us up and challenge us with issues that have affected human beings since the dawn of time.
