Behind the 3D glasses the image is doubly disturbing. In a desolate corner of Texas, a swarm of millions of bats flutters around a cave. Lightning is seen in the background and the flapping of the mammals' wings sounds like water falling on leaves. The mere idea of them suddenly changing course and crashing into our faces is terrifying - especially now, when Covid has stigmatized them as the spreaders of evil - but for British artist Jeremy Deller, who spent hours and hours recording them in 2012 , bats and their ability to live peacefully with each other are a model of collective solidarity from which humans would have a lot to learn.
Exodus, as Deller's film is titled, concludes with the cave's occupants forming a spiral column that rises toward the sky and is the final point of Art and Nature. A century of biomorphism, a luminous exhibition at CaixaForum that traces a beautiful and sensual journey through art born from the fascination with the forms of nature that become darker as it progresses, clouded by the threat of the environmental crisis. The exhibition is nourished by around eighty pieces (painting, sculpture, videos, installations, photography, design objects, architecture...) from the collections of the Center Pompidou in Paris, which returns to Barcelona - then it will tour other Spanish cities - with an authentic festival of masterpieces.
In the rooms of CaixaForum we find rotten donkeys (Dalí), women lying down or with flowers in their hats (Picasso), characters lost in the forest (Miró), flower women (Brassaï) or women with their throats cut, like the one created by Alberto Giacometti in 1932, inspired by the anatomy of a praying mantis, with its explosive and mysterious charge of pleasure, death and silence. It is this area, that of metamorphoses - Arp's sculptures are magnificent -, where the curator, Angela Lampe, shows one of the most brilliant chapters of biomorphism, a concept introduced by the first director of the MoMA in New York, Alfred H. Barr to name the boom in organic forms in art, design and architecture of the 1920s and 1930s.
There are also Georgia O'Keeffe, to whom Lampe gives the honor of opening the festival, Dubuffet, Paul Klee, Raoul Hausmann, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Alexander Calder (of whom a wire sculpture in the shape of a tree is shown created to decorate the habitat of the African cats at the Bronx Zoo) or Kandinsky's vitalist Bleu de ciel, highly influenced by Miró's Constellations, an atmospheric surface in which he suspends magical animals as a means of escape and poetic response to the occupation German.
Three decades later, Giovanni Anselmo, one of the representatives of Arte Povera, warned of the perishability of nature with a block of granite in which he inserted a lettuce condemned to the inevitable process of degradation. And, already in the 1970s, the Japanese Tetsumi Kudo created a group of works known as Pollution-Cultivation-New Ecology, fluorescently colored human penises and insects tangled in electrical cables covered by a layer of dry soil and discolored plastic flowers. Nature in ruins, flooded by the poisonous waters that stir in Pamela Rosenkranz's gigantic pool.
