Leandro Navarro’s Gallery proposes a dialogue between the painter José Gutiérrez-Solana (1886-1945) and the photographer Alberto García-Alix (1956-), through the exhibition “Down cemetery street”, which opens on Thursday September 8, 2022 within the framework of Madrid Gallery Weekend.

Though separated in time and technique, the works of both, painter and photographer, are endowed with a deep social charge and reflect the crudest, sordid and dramatic facet of environments and scenarios related to death, the body, eroticism, masks, religion, the fringe… Angélica Liddell, writer, poet and stage director expresses accurately in the prologue of the catalogue:

“Cantabrian and Leonese choose the sincerity of the outskirts. The outskirts, the suburbs, the cemetery street, all those outskirts are part of his political rebellion. In that outskirts our own terrors and our own miseries find shelter, which perhaps are those of the painter and the photographer. José’s funds are Alberto’s walls. Such as a declaration of principles, the inner turbulence seeks in those margins a total assumption of existence. That is where they find the truth. “Close to the walls are the scythes,” says Solana. In the same way the shadows are close to the walls of the photographer. Dissatisfaction seeks brotherhood with horror. There is an inevitability in the dark look. Like that clock described by Solana in La España negra, the hours revolve around a skull. We walk along the street of the cemetery, hand in hand with Alberto and José, we walk by our own hand, the street of the cemetery is the cruel throat of beauty. The aesthetic power of his works is measured by the immense shock that shakes our marrow”.

Dates: from September 8 to October 28, 2022

Leandro Navarro’s Gallery: Amor de Dios, 1 · 28014 · Madrid, Spain