The César Manrique Foundation (FCM) inaugurates on Thursday, June 4, the exhibition by artist Alberto Corazón titled Songs of the Soul. Incarnation and Mystery, where the painter engages in a conversation with the Discalced Carmelite poet Saint John of the Cross, with the purpose of materializing a plastic interpretation of his poem Dark Night. The event will begin at 7:30 PM in the Taro room —located at the institution's headquarters (Taro de Tahíche)— and, subsequently, a cocktail will be offered in the gardens. Admission is free and open to the public, with no prior reservation required.
The exhibition, which can be visited until November 2, 2026, displays the series of drawings by Alberto Corazón (Madrid, 1942 – 2021) titled Songs of the Soul, which is based on the eight songs of the Dark Night composed by Saint John of the Cross (Ávila, 1542 – Jaén, 1591), where he expresses the soul's joy for “having reached the high state of perfection, which is union with God, through the path of spiritual negation”.
The eight protagonist pieces are exhibited accompanied by thirteen drawings and six sculptures —on loan from Ana Arambarri, manager of the Corazón/Arambarri legacy—, linked to the language used in the works. The selection of content and the exhibition design has been the responsibility of Fernando Gómez Aguilera, director of the FCM and a great connoisseur of the work of the Madrid artist, for whom he has curated exhibitions at the IVAM in Valencia; and in Damascus, Amman, and Tehran, through SEACEX.
In his visual re-signification of the Dark Night, Corazón creates eight large-format compositions on paper that correspond to the eight songs of the mystic. If the poet adopts the lyre as a common metric form to generate a unified fabric, the painter organizes, in his visual poems, a symbolic sequence of eight doors reduced to the opening that delimits the jambs and lintel. Over the span of the opening, he disseminates his logo-iconic discourse: the calligraphic verses of Saint John treated as images and concise pictograms that proceed from his usual plastic vocabulary, and, at the same time, establish correspondences with the symbolism of Sanjuanista mysticism (houses, leaves, vessels, ziggurats, grates, stairs...).
“My intention was to transpose what is text and poetry into plastic art. In writing, the word is an essential element of the iconography of Western culture, and I wanted to try to integrate plastic art and word,” the artist would comment in 2012. He intended, in short, to give iconicity to writing, for which he places words, strokes, and symbols, as well as emotions, at the center of his visual narrative.
According to Gómez Aguilera, “the integration of text and iconography amalgamated on the same surface was a constant in Corazón's creative practice.” The curator of the exhibition points out that, for the artist, “the stroke that draws and the stroke that writes share the same biological basis and a common symbolic projection.” In this sense, he clarifies: “Alberto Corazón understood drawing as word and writing as drawing, because, ultimately, his entire creative life, as a painter and sculptor as well as a graphic and industrial designer, consisted of working with signs. Hence he suggested reading his drawings and understanding his strokes.”
The eight creations in the series Songs of the Soul were exhibited for the first time in the lower cloister of the Burgos Cathedral between May and September 2009, the year in which the first two months had been painted by the Madrid creator. They could then be seen in Úbeda, at the Hospital de Santiago, during the last month of the year. Through the IVAM and the Instituto Cervantes, they traveled to Stockholm (2011), Naples (2012), Milan (2012), and Rome (2012), gathered under the title Dark is the Song. In early 2015, the works were exhibited in the Sala Rafael Botí in Torrelodones, Madrid. The artist donated the works to the Fundación César Manrique in 2020, which is now showing them for the first time, accompanied by some complementary pieces.
Alberto Corazón was a painter, sculptor, and graphic designer. In the 1970s, he began working on a piece linked to conceptualism. In the 1970s and 1980s, he focused his activity on graphic and industrial design, fields in which he enjoyed extraordinary international prestige. In the 1990s, he intensely resumed his creative activity, producing painting and sculpture with a strong symbolic character. At the end of the 1990s, he proposed a new contemporary reading of still life and explored a synthetic painting of landscape. He was the creator of the corporate image and the design of the entire editorial line of the FCM.
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