“LA HUIDA”, 1976 / VICENTE AGUILERA CERNI CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM (MACVAC), Vilafamés, ALICANTE.

From the exhibition I held in 1976 at the Skira Gallery in Madrid, Carmen Maceín, the gallery director, selected several works destined for state museums: Museo Reina Sofía, then the Museum of Modern Art in Madrid, Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts, Museo-Casa Colón of Gran Canaria, and the Vicente Aguilera Cerni Contemporary Art Museum, in Vilafamés. It must be said that forty years ago we did not photograph as much as we do now, and I only had a few black and white images of these works. In 1995, I began organizing my archive, and in my attempt to recover them, I wrote to the museums, requesting that they send me photographs of my works that they held in their collections. It was not long before I received responses and color images of my works. However, the Vilafamés Museum did not reply, and although the museum’s name appears in the ‘Public Spaces’ list of my biography, as I have written documentation of the delivery, I have never had certainty about which work was part of their collection, and to be frank, with one thing and another, I gradually forgot about it.

Since I donated my archive to the Tarragona Municipal Library-Newspaper Archive, and they have begun organizing it, some surprises have emerged. Not long ago, I received an email from the director of the Newspaper Archive, Maria Elena Virgili, informing me that a scholarship student, Lledó Bagan, who was working on my archive, had noticed incomplete documentation regarding the Vilafamés Museum. Upon conducting research, she had observed that in the museum’s collection, there was a work that had all the characteristics of being mine, but it was attributed to another artist whose name phonetically resembled mine.

The elements that constitute this work, which I once titled: “La huida”, bring it close to those of “El estudiante del Arenál”, also from 1976, which is housed at the Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts. As do the materials used and the technique. Today, on Saint George’s Day, I received an email from the International Center for Artistic Documentation (CIDA), apologizing and sending me a splendid color image of the work. Apologies accepted; we are all human and, honoring our condition, we make mistakes, even though we strive for excellence. The most important thing is to be able to resolve them, even if it is forty years later.

La huída

————————————————Josep Maria Rosselló————————————————–