The title, Concordances, sums up the exhibition’s goal, namely, to bear historic witness to the convergence in art in Spain, Mexico and the rest of Latin America. The sixty paintings and works on paper in the show open a dialogue between some modern Mexican artworks and others of Spanish heritage, covering a time span of four centuries.

The delicate balance struck between the different voices intoning together served as one of our guiding principles, as too was the expansion of criteria, focusing on diversity and coupling major and minor masters. At once, the exhibition model was designed to act as an innovative platform for a visual interrelationship with art. In short, we have accommodated all the different generations, cultures, origins and genders of the artists whose works are included in the BBVA Collection in order to favour unexpected mirror plays that will afford the beholder many rewarding sentient experiences.

Negotiating between figuration and abstraction, the exhibition walkthrough is arranged around six core themes: portraiture; customs and manners; descriptions of nature, both still lifes and unaltered landscapes; animism and magic; myths and legends of the past, both American and European; and matter and cosmos, with special attention paid to the benevolent land of Mexico, bracketed between the Conquest and the Spanish exile after the Civil War.

Each work in this selection finds an echo in the others; taken together they form the cogs in the mechanism of a mestizo poetic system that conjoins the Western imaginary with archaic dreams peopled with indigenous gods. In the secret of symbols, the sacred and the profane are entwined in a syncretism that, in stimulating our emotion and imagination, will provide an escape from the everyday and allow us to contemplate the world with fresh eyes.

Sylvia Navarrete Bouzard
Curator