This exhibition is a kind of game like that of Alice in Wonderland, when Alice goes through the looking glass and enters another reality, in a completely different dimension. Here we will see the other dimension of the paintings, what is hidden but which is as much a part of the work as the painted surface", emphasizes Miguel Falomir, director of the Prado Museum, when he presents Reversos, a large exhibition that proposes to look at the paintings in all their corporeality, in all three dimensions, creating a surprising cabinet of curiosities, of wonders. A cabinet in which, not infrequently, the works are against the wall like the reproduction of the back of Las meninas that opens the tour.
An exhibition in which there are amazing paintings by Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Goya, Magritte, Miró, Tàpies, Hammershoi or Pistoletto, which show the fascination of the geniuses for the back of the canvases, for the racks, and easels. An exhibition in which the paintings sometimes hide provocative eroticism, such as with the Kneeling Nun (1731) by Martin van Meytens, which on the reverse – seen thanks to an indiscreet mirror – shows the novice praying... with her buttocks bare , a painting that the Swedish ambassador in Paris had in his personal cleaning cabinet and showed only a few friends. A journey in which many of the backs of the fabrics save sarcastic messages or stamps of their travels. But an exhibition that, Falomir points out, could not open in any other way than by alluding to Las meninas, the Prado's most iconic work.
"There are many things - said Falomir - that attract the attention of Las meninas, but one is the large portion of the surface, a fifth part, that occupies the reverse side of the canvas on which Velázquez works. I think he wanted to remind us that art is not just an image." In addition, the exhibition has managed to bring the artist from Boston to his studio, from Rembrandt: “It is wonderful to see how, although they did not meet, two great geniuses, Velázquez and Rembrandt, think practically the same. In the painting, Rembrandt is thinking in front of a work of which we see the reverse, practically the same as Velázquez does in Las meninas. The subject of the reverse ends up becoming an artistic subgenre by itself", reasoned the director.
And he emphasized that the curator of the exhibition, the artist Miguel Ángel Blanco, has given "conceptual density to a subject that goes beyond the anecdote of turning a painting around", with works that go from the 15th century to XXI and finds such as seeing the frames of the paintings as crosses: in the exhibition, part of the Guernica frame is on display, much traveled and heavily pierced by nails.
The montage parades trompe-l'oeils through black-painted rooms such as Boilly's sweet-toothed cat, which tears the canvas of a painting in order to eat the herrings hanging on the back. There are also two-sided works, with creations on both sides. And others that weren't but that had entire works on the back: the expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner reused the backs because of poverty and painted 135. Sometimes on the back there are travel labels or texts that indicate belonging, but also ironies such as that of La lavativa by Eugenio Lucas Velázquez, in which Goyesque characters grab a man in order to administer a huge enema. On the back, it says: “What were you thinking? Silly! In this world no one escapes". And there is no shortage of ghosts that appear when the oils infiltrate the fabrics. The most impressive, a self-portrait of Orazio Borgianni in which his ghost pokes his nose out from behind.
