In Cádiz the halls are replicated like a mirror on the old rooftops. The walls rise above the ceilings, becoming parapets that give solidity to the floors and project the rooms and doors that are just below into the open sky. One can visualize oneself hanging laundry right in the space occupied by the living room or sunbathing in what is the bedroom below. In a finite city in which the citizens of Cádiz solve the lack of space for vacation in the heights, rare is the resident of the historic center who does not have a childhood memory associated with those stays in the sun. For Cecilio Chaves, they evoke afternoons of homework and a Superman costume: “It was the garden of my house.” Now, at 52 years old, the one known as rooftop painter He likes to guess which room is hidden behind those covers while, brush in hand, he faces the challenge of portraying a whiteness that flirts with the dozens of shades that go from the cold dawn to the warm sunset.
That, painting the rooftops of Cádiz in a full day, is not the only challenge he had to overcome to conceive the exhibition 360 Cadiz. Along a 32-meter wall – which, in turn, is also a canvas – extends a polyptych of 31 paintings in which the complete view of Cádiz is captured from the Tavira tower, an 18th century viewpoint located in the geographical center of the historic center converted 30 years ago into a tourist dark room. The exhibition, which can be visited until November 15 at the Santa Catalina Castle, uses as an excuse that anniversary and that of the artist himself, who celebrates the three decades since he was able to dedicate himself “to making a living from this.” “It is a project that I had been thinking about for a long time. “It has been six months of full dedication for the mere whim of doing it, without thinking about the commercial, because a work of 31 paintings is not,” points out the painter.
Throughout the 32 meters of wall, the works are located above, below and on the line that marks the sea as the eternal horizon of Cádiz. In that skyline From roofs with whitewashed walls and reddish tiles, bell towers, domes and some of the 126 viewing towers with which the shippers of the Indies of the 17th and 18th centuries crowned their mansions to control the entry and exit of their merchandise ships stand out. On canvases of varying formats, Chaves frames fragments of that view that any tourist can contemplate from the top of the Tavira tower – the tallest of all – but deliberately avoids the most obvious scenes while portraying the most essential landmarks: the castle of San Sebastián, the cathedral and the Constitution Bridge of 1812 (these two already under the fluorescent night light).
The result is a view in which these heritage landmarks of the landscape are interspersed with television antennas, glass roofs and even solar panels that unfold over a landscape of uniform height, thus conceived between the baroque and the neoclassical. The transition from day to night, one of the greatest challenges of the work, causes the tones to vary from the cold of dawn to the powerful oranges and reds of dusk. In the 360-degree view “there are no people, but there are signs of them, like hanging clothes,” as Chaves explains. And it is there where the object portrayed, Cádiz, displays all the attractiveness that makes it have one of the “most peculiar” aerial views of the country.
For centuries, the city has had its historic center—just one square kilometer—constricted by the belt of sea that surrounds it. This already meant that those hedonistic bourgeois merchants of the 17th and 18th centuries, who longed for all the money and power that their birth did not give them, were prevented from building large palaces with gardens, much to the taste of the nearby Sevillian nobility. So the businessmen deployed palaces at heights of between three and four floors, festooned with viewing towers, and in which the rooftops were those leisure spots stolen by the absence of green. This has forever marked the uses that the people of Cádiz give to the two planes of the city, the aerial one and the one at ground level. “Leisure and tranquility are on the rooftops, facing the street and its noise,” summarizes Chaves. The difference is highlighted even more thanks to the fact that the exhibition installation is set to real sound from the city: noise of street bustle, sound of seagulls, ringing of bells.
In the 31 canvases of the polyptych it is not difficult to imagine yourself lost among the labyrinthine route of parapets that outline open-air rooms. Chaves, a resident of the center, remembers those childhood afternoons of crafts, homework and games, while today as an adult he continues to go to the upper floors of his building for vacation. “There are few physiognomies like these because in few cities you can experience the rooftop so much,” says the artist. After 30 years of work, the painter attests that the city’s rooftops have not changed much either, despite the solar panels and pergolas that have proliferated in recent years. The private garden of Cádiz is still at the end of the stairs, where the sky meets the sea.
