Away from the easy idea that your project would be a “Picasso was here”, the photographer from madrid Cecilia Orueta (1963) was followed during three years, between 2013 and 2015, in the footsteps of the artist from malaga, not only in the city where he was born October 25, 1881, and of which captured, among other places, the baptismal font where he was baptized the son of Jose Ruiz and Maria Picasso. Also, other spaces in Spain, which “were fundamental to his painting and that he influenced,” says Orueta. Thus, A Coruña, Madrid, Barcelona and two smaller towns catalans, Horta de San Juan in Tarragona, and Gósol (Lleida), were scenarios, with more or less fortune, for the child, adolescent, apprentice artist and genius. That journey, in part real, in part fantasy, with photographs inspired in his painting and in what could be your life”, he points out, make up the book The Spanish landscapes of Picasso, of the editorial Nordic walking.
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Before rushing in to shoot with his camera, Orueta was soaked in the letters and biographies on Picasso, “there are so many details about your life that don’t really know to what extent are literature.” The pictures that you took –”I photographed imagining your state of mind”–, accompanying them in the book, the texts of six writers and experts in the life and work of the father of cubism: his biographer, Rafael Inglada speaking of Malaga, where he lived the first ten years of life and created his paintings more ancient.
Manuel Rivas followed by A Coruña, Julio Llamazares, Madrid, and Eduardo Mendoza, in Barcelona. Complete the story the doctor in History of Art, Eduard Vallès, to describe the passage in Horta, and the of Gósol is remembered by Jèssica Jaques, researcher of the work of Picasso and professor of Aesthetics and Theory of Arts at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. “I proposed that they were the authors, but then they had total freedom, I wanted to switch texts more literary with other more on his painting,” explains Orueta. She also she wore her script prior, with the ideas of what he wanted to portray, “but then the reality is capricious”.
this road movie photo by the life of Picasso, Orueta is left with impressions like the one that caused her to “find the board in Gósol closed, anchored in time”, to which they arrived, exhausted, Picasso and his lover then, Fernande Olivier, both with 24 years, after a trek of eight hours, explains Jèssica Jaques.
The waves of A Coruña
stepping into the shoes of Picasso, Orueta highlights the sea in la Coruña, by the fascination it inspired in Picasso’s view, from the classroom of the institute, the waves crashing against the rocks. “The city that woke up my senses”, wrote the artist of those four years. Madrid was, in contrast, “the melancholy of a city in winter”, says the photographer, a teenager who was found alone, without money, in punishment for skipping the classes of drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, and in addition fell ill of scarlet fever in that poblachón galdós-esque. Only relieved of his passage through the capital, his visits to the Prado Museum “and when he painted in the Retreat, where she used to go to”.
The meeting with his family in Barcelona was to go from night to day, in the light of the Mediterranean. There, Picasso made friends with the avant-garde intellectual and artistic, and is trailed by the district of el Born or the Gothic, whose environment portrays Orueta. A city that, as described by Eduardo Mendoza, “it was a project of Paris in miniature, more friendly”. The book continues through his life-giving stay at Horta, where he learned, as he said, “all I knew”, a sentence to refer to the stage of happiness wild that he spent with his friend Manuel Pallares, who “had shared a desk in the School of Fine Arts of Barcelona,” writes Eduard Vallès. In those seven months, the adolescent urbanite learned “to make knots, milking cows, or light a fire outdoors.”
The Spanish landscapes of Picasso is closed with the photo of the portrait that the man from malaga made of Josep Fondevila, the owner of the inn of Gósol in which stayed with Fernande. It is a picture disturbing because the old man of head without hair and vivid look ahead to look you would have your own author years later.
