Word: catalanes
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...season's shows in Manhattan, one that was unaccountably ignored by critics is Xavier Corbero's at the BlumHelman Warehouse (through June 11). At 53, Corbero, a Catalan who lives in Barcelona, is one of the best though most idiosyncratic sculptors in Europe; his show, "The Catalan Opening," contains work of such metaphorical richness, variety and wit that one would need to be an aesthetic pruneface not to enjoy...
...Catalan opening is, of course, a chess gambit. Corbero's exhibition is a set of 16 black chess pieces -- king and queen, hulking monoliths more than 9 1/2 ft. high, and a whimsical army of knights, bishops, rooks and pawns, all carved and constructed from basalt. This brittle volcanic rock is too hard to chisel cleanly; it can only be sawed or broken like a flint. Corbero revels in the risks of breaking it. Each piece of basalt becomes a found object -- altered, but bearing a memory of the raw look it had in the quarry...
...second was its tenacious originality. O'Keeffe was as thoroughly American as Joan Miro -- whose clarity and depth of space her work sometimes distantly recalled -- was Catalan; her paintings remind those sated with cross-cultural quotation that major art is more apt to spring from deep allegiances to specific experience than from isms. She did not go to Europe until she was 65. When she saw Mont Ste.-Victoire from Cezanne's studio above Aix-en-Provence, she characteristically called it "a poor little mountain" -- which it is, in a way, compared with the landscapes that surround her Ghost Ranch...
...seemed. But in an attempt to hold the continued support of the bourgeoisie, the ruling group pleaded the necessity for "iron discipline" on the home front, and thus banned trade unions at the same time as the Cominterm press was exalting the merits of the anarcho-syndicalists of Catalan, who had "risen to the occasion...
...long way from the flickering mutability, the twisting disintegration of objects in newly imagined space, that gave early cubism its wildly adventurous look. Gris was a Madrileño-which was to say, a provincial, brought up in a far stodgier cultural milieu than Picasso the Catalan-and his work does not even look particularly "Spanish": no craziness, no tragedy, no genitals, no folklore...