Joaquín Sorolla stars in an exhibition in Valencia that covers five centuries of painting, from the Middle Ages to the Contemporary, in which he is accompanied by works by Juan de Juanes, José de Ribera, Francisco Zurbarán, José Benlliure and Ignacio Pinazo.
This is the exhibition "From darkness to light", made up of 75 works acquired by the Valencian Generalitat from the Lladró family, which had been kept in boxes in a Madrid warehouse for five years, without being touched by light, and which now they can be seen in all their splendor in the Palacio de Comunicaciones, the old Post Office building.
The exhibition begins and ends with Sorolla: a 25-square-meter painting, "I am the bread of life", welcomes the visitor at the entrance to the exhibition, accompanied by another canvas that is the image of the exhibition, "La labradora ", after which a chronological walk through five centuries of art begins to say goodbye with another five canvases by the Valencian artist.
The exhibition is divided into four sections: from the Gothic to the Renaissance, the splendor of the Baroque, painting from the 19th and 20th centuries and the figure of Joaquín Sorolla, by whom you can also see two traditional pieces and three small intimate landscapes, such as " The patio of the Cabanyal", "The kitchen of the garden" or "The garden of the convent".
The chronological discourse of this exhibition ranges from a painting from 1390 to a landscape from the 1950s, created mostly by Valencian artists such as Juan de Juanes, Juan Ribalta, Mariano Benlliure or Joaquín Sorolla, together with authors such as Francisco of Zurbarán, Alonso Berruguete or José Ribera.
The Palace of Communications, where the exhibition is exhibited, is a building that was completed in 1923, the year Sorolla died, and which has been converted into a museum to house an exhibition of 73 paintings and two sculptures with which to start the Sorolla Year events, and that over the next three months it will be accompanied by more cultural events in this space in the center of Valencia.
This building was not conceived as a museum and for this reason it has needed adaptations: the large glass dome on the roof has been darkened to prevent the sun's rays from hitting the oil paintings, and a slight noise can be heard in the background: that of the air conditioners, chillers and humidifiers that maintain constant temperature and humidity.
A new architecture has also been created inside the centenary building to house the works, but which has been measured "to the last millimeter" so that the infrastructure is not obscured and so that it is perceived that "the first work of art in the exhibition is the Palace of Communications itself", explained the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Pablo González Tornel.
When the exhibition concludes, the works will go to the Museum of Fine Arts in Valencia, which will allow it to become one of the most important Sorolla artistic collections in the world, after the collection of the Sorolla House Museum in Madrid, as it will have more than fifty pieces by the Valencian artist, some large.
"It has been the incentive for us to think of a new room for Sorolla", has admitted González Tornel, who has explained that to exhibit "I am the bread of life" a space is needed to allow it to be enjoyed, and has assured that "La Valencian Labrador" is "an icon" that any museum would like.
