Behind the double grille of the lower choir, from where the cloistered nuns followed the mass, today a video installation is projected in a subdued environment on three screens of arid landscapes of saltpeter and mining exploitations in Sweden, Bolivia, Peru, Chile and Spain, with its ambient sound. It is the long road traveled since this building was the church of the Verónicas convent, in Murcia, founded in 1529, although the temple, baroque, is from the 18th century, until the new use that was given to it almost four decades ago, when the The temple was desecrated and converted into the Verónicas Room of contemporary art.
The interior of the church is a white space in which few of its original decorative elements remain. Three exhibitions are organized every year. “Normally, we look at established, experienced artists, whom we propose to present a project; On other occasions it is a curator who tells us about a possible candidate and then there is another line, in which projects offered by artists are accepted and a commission is evaluated,” explains the person in charge of the room, Rosa Miñano.
Of the three chosen each year, “one is always regional and the other two are national or international artists,” says Mari Carmen Ros, museum technician, who works in the room. “For artists it is a challenge to put together an exhibition expressly for this famous place. They always have to contribute some new works, specifically designed for this place,” he adds.
It is one of the distinctive characteristics of the Sala Verónicas, located on the ground floor of the church and dependent on the Government of the Region of Murcia, where it has made a place for itself in contemporary art beyond the traditional Madrid-Barcelona axis. Each exhibition is mounted based on the 43 linear meters of exhibition wall of a building declared an Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC), a protection that has sometimes prevented any of the artists’ proposals from being captured. “The room transforms with each one of them, it conditions them because it is very powerful,” says Miñano, for whom, on the other hand, this circumstance allows the space to “participate formally and spatially in each project, which turns the exhibitions into risky bets.”
Since 1989, Peter Greenaway, José Manuel Ballester, Juan Uslé, Joan Fontcuberta have passed through here, which received 19,000 visitors in 2024; Antoni Abad, Juan Muñoz, Marina Núñez, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Eva Lootz, Daniel Canogar, Pablo Genovés and Concha Jerez, among others, in addition to group exhibitions. Little by little the people of Murcia have been making this room their own, those responsible point out, since it is the public that mostly visits it. Another hallmark of the Sala Verónicas (which invited this journalist) are the beautiful and careful catalogs that are published with each exhibition.
The one that can be seen until January 5 is a retrospective of the artist Rosell Meseguer, born in Orihuela (Alicante), titled blank earthwhich focuses on some of its most significant series, “and with 60% new pieces,” explains the artist by phone.
Among the pieces on display are from his series Ovni archivewhich collect “the consequences of the Cold War today through books, photographs and engravings, some of which show the peculiar architecture of the time, which in some cases remind us of UFOs.” There are also his disturbing images of abandoned military architecture, such as submarine docks or air raid shelters, displayed in what were former chapels. This artist, whose work is very attached to the earth as a material, also shows open hand-painted accounting books, each representing an element of the periodic table, on which she applies paints, emulsions and pigments.
With history, war, the coast and mining and how these affect the landscape and society, as the main themes on which he has worked in his two decades of career, Meseguer points out that “the most important thing” in each project “is “the relationship between the idea and its material formalization.”
Thus we arrive at the most impressive piece of the exhibition, a polyptych that has been displayed where the main altar was, at the head of the temple. Five meters wide and 10 meters high, it is made up of 15 rows, each with five paper rectangles on which paint has been applied in different tones that represent the different minerals of the Region of Murcia and the Vega Baja del Segura (Alicante). ): from the white of salt, to the black of lignite, passing through manganese, talc, zinc… An altarpiece of earthly materials.
“It is a complicated room because you have to think above all about the height and, furthermore, the chapels are very narrow, so the main pieces have to go in the transepts,” he explains. “It is common for artists to put their great piece in that space. While for the low choir they refer, due to its lighting, to something more intimate and collected,” completes Miñano.
In the center of the room, Meseguer has placed several display cases with abundant documentation, as happens in his exhibitions: from ancient treaties, pieces from the Archaeological Museum of Murcia, such as a lead ingot or some Roman projectiles; artist books, fanzines and toys, which form an idea of the archives, into which he dives for his work, beyond being mere containers of documents, to turn them into cabinets of curiosities.
When the Meseguer exhibition ends, Miñano anticipates that the next one will have Victoria Civera as a guest, a creator in whom, although painting predominates in her production, she has also expressed herself through other languages, such as photography, photomontage, sculpture and installation. He will be the next artist who will have to face the challenge of a particular room, where upon entering you feel something of the seclusion in which those cloistered nuns lived who followed mass behind a double fence.