Martí Domínguez has won the III Humanistic Essay Good Letters prize, endowed with 6,000 euros, with the work Del natural, which Edicions 62 will publish in October. In the book, the writer traces a journey through the history of painting focusing on the presence of nature in works of art and the evolution of its perception.
Domínguez explained to La Vanguardia that the relationship between nature and art has always caught his attention, especially since "the way of representing it in the Italian Renaissance, because it is very precise even though it has symbolic content, and a naturalistic desire is seen" .
The tour has two great poles, on the one hand the Italian and Flemish Renaissance, with Giotto's lamb or the force of Jan Van Eyck's natural work, and on the other Impressionism, but it is presented as a process, a continuum with the romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich or Paul Cézanne and his Santa Victoria mountain as a totemic element, “even Gaugin, who for me is the last of the greats that nature paints”.
The second part is "a cry regarding the lack of interest of the cultural world for nature, and of the artists themselves, which reflects a disconnection and the loss of contact between culture and artistic creation, with a more cosmopolitan and international art but less of its own, unrelated Of the territory".
"It is a call to recover painting from nature, to repaint what is seen and interpret it from the current point of view, also to protect and vindicate the nature that surrounds us, at a time when nature is in decline," he continues. . For Domínguez, "it sometimes seems that defending landscapes or the elements that compose them is something only for naturalists, but defending the environment is not something romantic, because as you can see it affects us all."
For the Valencian writer, the book is related to his previous essay El somni de Lucreci (which won the Carles Rahola essay prize ten years ago), with a vocation for narrating and thinking, and it is also in a way "a tribute to El descrèdit of Joan Fuster's reality, an essay that perhaps has not been sufficiently vindicated from the world of art”.
In an epilogue, he also talks about contemporary art based on an anecdote by Georges Braque and how he was distressed by the perception of a squirrel that Picasso had seen in one of his abstract paintings.
Nine works were submitted to the prize, convened by the Royal Academy of Fine Letters of Barcelona with a jury made up of Lola Badia, Judit Carrera, Marta Segarra, Margalida Tomàs and Borja de Riquer.
As a writer, Martí Domínguez (Madrid, 1966) has specialized in narrative and essays, usually from a scientific perspective, as it could not be otherwise as a doctor in Biology, in addition to directing the magazine Mètode de investigación.
His latest novel, Mater (Proa, 2022), explores from science fiction a world in which humanity has stopped procreating naturally and births are pure technology with optimized genetics, in a plot that for the writer is his response to the asks “What makes us human?” Art, in relation to nature, also responds.
Catalan version, here
