Destroy to create again. With a snip of the scissors, the artist Josep Maria Rosselló, who has an exhibition of large-format canvases installed at Tinglado 1 on Tarragona’s coastal pier, has been cutting his works into pieces, a few each day. And when the walls of the hall are empty again, a group of young artists will bring life back, creating other works. At the exhibition, Creation-Destruction. Theory of a process , Rosselló presents six large paintings on canvas. Four, each measuring 7.5 x 2.5 meters, were painted thirty years ago in Rome, during the theatrical performance of the Pascua popular flamenca, directed by Salvador Távora, based on an idea by José Monleón, and performed by the company La Cuadra de Sevilla and the National Ballet of Madrid. Rosselló painted the canvases live, during the show, and with the limited light available on stage. Probably, he says, ‘the first time in the world of theater’ that a painting was created live, in front of the audience. As there were four performances, the show generated four works, titled Christ of the Resurrection or Gypsy Christ. They were subsequently moved to the artist’s studio in Madrid, and then to a warehouse. ‘For various reasons,’ these canvases could not be recovered until twenty years later and had never been photographed, ‘and the project’s graphic documentation was very precarious,’ according to the artist. Now they are being exhibited, for the last time intact, in Tarragona. The same exhibition also features two more monumental canvases that he painted for the project L’Art al Carrer (Art in the Street), in 1986, in Madrid, in collaboration with art critic Santiago Amón.

However, Rosselló has decided to destroy all the canvases, except for the first one painted in Rome, which is the best preserved. It is currently deposited at the Museum of Modern Art of the Tarragona Provincial Council, along with other works from his collection, and when the exhibition concludes, it will return to the museum.

The others, however, will not. With energetic snips, every day for the past week, Rosselló has been cutting them into small pieces. More than destruction, however, Rosselló speaks of ‘transformation’: ‘It is a metamorphosis, a mutation of form; when they were rolled up, they were like a long worm, and now they have transformed into hundreds of butterflies,’ he explains. Until now, the paintings were unframed and stored rolled up in tubes: ‘They are cotton canvases with a very light primer, made with industrial acrylic paint, and no matter how much care one might take, they were sooner or later doomed. It is already a miracle that they have been preserved until now, considering the circumstances and the condition they were in when they were recovered,’ the artist remarks. And he recalls that they were made ‘to fulfill a function, to create a spectacle, not to remain in time’.

The three canvases of the Christ of the Resurrection, once cut, will be stored in urns, ‘so that they do not lose their market value,’ and will be preserved at the Port Authority of Tarragona. From the two from L’Art al Carrer, once cut into pieces, Rosselló will select some scraps to create two artist’s books; the rest will be for visiting public, who can take them, provided they make small financial contributions that will serve to finance the second part of this project which ‘opens to future generations’. Indeed, once these pieces are removed from the walls of Tinglado 1, a team of artists selected by the Teler de Llum art center will bring life back to the white walls that will have remained after the destruction. Artists Foham Fonezs, Aureol Sanz, and Miquel Falgàs have chosen to dedicate their work to freedom of expression, following the terrorist attack on the Parisian weekly Charlie Hebdo. ‘It is a work that will grow as the exhibited works diminish. This is how a furiously vital creation-destruction-creation chain will become evident,’ Rosselló emphasizes. At the end of the exhibition, only a single canvas will remain on display, the only one that will have been saved intact; the rest of the walls will be covered with the work generated by the new generation of artists, and three urns will treasure works that, by the artist’s will, will have changed form.