At the beginning of the eighties, the city of processional marches and flamenco, of Baroque and convents, began to have some countercultural buds that soon exploded to turn Seville into an icon of modernity. Silvio and Sacramento sounded, progressive rock, the theater companies gave life to the abandoned venues that numbered in the hundreds in the city center, and the visual artists, painters in their early 20s, rebelled against academicism. “The painting lacks cabaret, it has plenty of convent spirit, morality, transcendence and many poorly understood ethics,” the Cordoban artist Rafael Agredano would write in number zero of the Figura Magazinean unquestionable reference for Spanish contemporary art that was born as a game between that group of artists who were still students of Fine Arts in Seville.
In one of those many abandoned buildings in the historic center, at number 12 Mármoles Street, “next to a bookstore where the Communist Party was always conspiring, and for which Carmen Laffón even made a poster”, it opened in that Seville The optimistic and disheveled Rafael Ortiz Gallery was built in 1984 by the couple formed by Rafael Ortiz and Rosalía Benítez, young people from the same generation as those painters, who demonstrated that the city that makes the defense of tradition one of its hallmarks could be a focus for the dissemination of contemporary art. Not a mere branch that feeds on what others produce, but a source that radiated new approaches to art to the rest of the country.
Forty years later, they are the only survivors of that journey in which projects of enormous national weight were also embarked on, such as Juana de Aizpuru and La Maquina Española. “There was a lot of cultural activity, a lot of galleries, but they opened and closed,” recalls Rafael, the last bastion of contemporary art in Seville with a voice, presence and prominence on the national and international scene and who continues to strive to place emerging creators on the map. in the south. A high percentage of the gallery’s roster of artists are Andalusian, “but a very high percentage of the best national artists are also Andalusian,” Rosalía Benítez emphasizes and defends.
The so-called New Figuration of Madrid, for example, is paradoxically made up of a significant number of Sevillian and Andalusian painters who were born in the heat of the Rafael Ortiz gallery, in a work of support and accompaniment to their work that continues to be a trademark of the house: Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Chema Cobo, Luis Gordillo…. They were able to be born artistically thanks to the silent and persevering work of these two gallery owners. “Now we look at it with great satisfaction, we are very excited to have gotten this far, but the beginnings were very hard, we looked at the balance of the month and consoled ourselves by saying: well, we have lost less than the previous month,” Rosalía remembers with a smile. placid They invented new methods of survival, monthly fees of 25 pesetas “that young artists and new collectors took off with a beer for the illusion of being able to buy a painting. That doesn’t happen now,” says the gallerist: “There was a desire to move forward, I didn’t really know what, something that was perceived as a change, as an openness to new things, to new ideas, to new illusions.”
That of Rafael and Rosalía has been a silent revolution. Almost silently they evolved and soon came the firm presence of the gallery in national and international fairs, the consolidation and prestige of its artists, the appearance of new languages and new creators, which also absorbed this space, such as the so-called Generation of the 2000, with Miki Leal and Rubén Guerrero as headliners. Even the audacity of putting a pike in Madrid 12 years ago —RO Projectson Huertas Street—which has also established itself on the gallery map of the capital. Of course, Rafael and Rosalía, despite “the continuous crises”, never wanted to leave Seville: “It is our commitment to the city, we have not wanted to abandon.”
The exhibition will tell of all this memory, that of a journey that began with a naive unconsciousness and was able to evolve thanks to “resistance” – as they maintain over and over again during the conversation. A whistle in the wind. 40 years of the Rafael Ortiz gallerywhich opens this Tuesday in the neighboring room of the Center for Cultural Initiatives (CICUS) of the University of Seville. There will be more than one hundred works that will be exhibited, one for each artist who has been part of the Rafael Ortiz family—“With whom we have maintained a very close relationship”—and which opens with an engraving by Picasso that was part of the first exhibition with which the gallery opened in 1984. “It was the only thing we sold, it was bought in installments by a young artist and we have been able to recover it from a private collection,” Rafael recalls.
Even so, it will not be a chronological exhibition or a succession of artists, it will be a “whimsical” celebration, emphasizes the gallerist, that reflects the spirit and line of work of the gallery throughout these four decades — “Our way of being ”—, although it also, unconsciously, collects three great generational moments of Sevillian painting, that of the deceased Carmen Laffón, Jaime Burguillos, Gerardo Delgado and Teresa Duclós, among others; the eighties explosion with Patricio Cabrera (another of the gallery’s founding artists), Curro González and Antonio Sosa; or the most recent with José Miguel Pereñíguez, Rubén Guerrero and Miki Leal. But also many other great artists that Andalusia has given to the contemporary world, from José Guerrero and Manuel Barbadillo to Luis Gordillo; from José María Báez to Javier Buzón, Manolo Bautista, Claudio del Campo, Juan Lacomba… And flying over all of them, the Cordoban Team 57, whose vindication and enhancement on the national artistic map has had a lot to do with the work of the Rafael Ortiz gallery. “We have always tried to create families,” they both maintain.