A woman with a child in her arms is the image that has presided since yesterday over the apse of the Basilica of Santa Maria del Pi in Barcelona, next to the Rambla. Is it a maternity? Not exactly, because the child is not a baby and the mother does not breastfeed. She, too, is not a virgin in majesty, for the woman is not seated on a throne, nor is the child, on her lap, looking forward. Nor is it a pity, although the child, who seems asleep or faint, could be dead, but he is too young. According to tradition, Jesus was 33 years old when he died on the cross.
So, what does this 14 meter high and 10 meter wide canvas represent, which has been installed behind the image of the Virgen del Pi and will be there until Christmas? It is called Crianza and its author, Aryz, refers: “Formally, she is a mother with a son, and then each one has to make the image their own. Love is a universal value: it is a mother who accompanies her child until she fends for herself, hence the name of Parenting ”. At one point in the conversation with La Vanguardia, the artist points out: "It can also be a truncated maternity." Aryz is the artistic name of Octavi Serra Arrizabalaga, an urban artist from Cardedeu, born 35 years ago.
“The initial proposal is based on a list of values inherent to the basilica that the Pi people sent me,” he explains. I am not a religious person, but these values are universal. We are talking about friendship, generosity, otherness, which is accepting the opinion of the other and considering it valid... Perhaps they are not values that are in the DNA of the human being, but they should be in that of society”.
“The people of the basilica wanted us to do something – he continues -. They opened the doors wide for me, and they were open to everything I proposed to them. The altar is the place where a piece shines the most and since I come from the mural, which dialogues with the environment, here you enter a space that is wonderful, with many elements to dialogue. And the first proposal, which was an outline of what we see now, has already been accepted”.
In this dialogue, Aryz recalls that in the place now occupied by Crianza there was an altarpiece that disappeared in 1714. “Only the virgin who now presides over the basilica survived. This virgin was in dialogue with that altarpiece, which we do not know what it was like because there are no records, and now she is in dialogue with this piece, and that is magical”.
The monumental piece was painted on a canvas in the workshop of the Germans Castells, the historic set designers of Cardedeu, and in the basilica it has been mounted on a wooden scaffold. Yesterday, at the inauguration, it was planned that, while the parish priest blessed it, Raül Refree would improvise a piece on the organ.
But how does Aryz get to receive this commission? First there were the graffiti, which appeared on the exterior walls of the thousand-year-old stones of the Pi church. But when one of these artistic interventions ended up damaging the heritage of this Gothic basilica, Jordi Sacasas, who is the curator of the Pi, decided to turn it around: "We denounced the incident as something specific, because it was an attack on the church of the Pi, which is a cultural asset of national interest (BCIN), but what we did not want is to condemn the entire group, because the controversy criminalized urban art. So it seemed interesting to us to enter into a discourse with this whole world. I discovered in an interview that Xavier Ballaz, from B-Murals, expressed values that were very similar to our way of thinking and I contacted him”.
Thus, the Pi basilica proposes to B-Murals "a regulated intervention of urban art, as has been done in Germany, in the church of San Pedro in Cologne, a reference for us, because since the eighties it has delivered the pastoral discourse of the Church with contemporary art”, explains Sacasas. It must be added that the Basilica del Pi has always been characterized by going beyond the liturgy. “Since the 17th century, when there was already a social awareness of participation with the citizenry, until the confinement of immigrants in 2001, there has always been an interest in opening up to people, especially the most marginalized groups; and there is also a cultural will, with the recovery of the musical background that goes back to 1140. That is, different paths so that everything converges in the pastoral fact”.
And B-Murals entrusts the intervention to Aryz. It is not the first time that the artist, who has work in half the world, intervenes in a temple. He already did it in Rouen, in Bologna, in Paris... But on this occasion, as it was a church in Barcelona, he considered that money could not be an impediment. “The project got stuck due to financing, but I thought it was something that had to happen, that it is one project among a thousand, because it had never happened in Barcelona, and that is why I put money obtained from the sale of work”. Aryz has done it for the love of art, another universal value.
Catalan version, here
