La ciutat que mai no existí / La ciudad que nunca existió / The City that never was

What is it that leads us to interpret certain artistic representations of cities as fantastic? The discovery in the late fifteenth century of Roman frescoes representing imaginary architectures saw the start of a new conception of art and a new genre: the architectural capriccio. A capriccio shows a building or a city that may be real, but which becomes fantastic or illusory in character thanks to the composition and pictorial treatment. It is a space where it is impossible to simply be.

This exhibition turns around the genre of the architectural capriccio (16th and 18th centuries), with representatives of the foremost painters of the leading European schools (Monsù Desiderio, Vredeman de Vries, Marieschi, Bellotto, Hubert Robert) engaged in a dialogue with a selection of Pompeian frescoes and artists of the historical avant-garde movements to have been influenced by this pictorial tradition: De Chirico, Léger, Klee, Delvaux. The effect of this genre on contemporary artists is represented by the work of Ann Veronica Janssens, Catherine Yass and Miquel Navarro, among others.

Authors: Pedro Azara, Karsten Harries, Jean-Jacques Wunenburger

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