Glorying In Grottiness

Yesterday, Karen and I set out in the early afternoon to visit an often overlooked gallery in Valencia, the Centro Cultural Bancaja. It's run by the Fundación Bancaja, the cultural outreach arm of one of Spain’s largest banks. As it was after 2 and before 5 p.m. – lunch and then siesta time in Spain, when almost everything closes down – the place, as we half suspected it would be, was shut tight. Cerrado! (We went back today, but more about that later.)

So we went meandering off into Bario el Carmen, the adjacent nightclub/entertainment district in the old town. It’s all narrow twisty streets and little alleyways. Nightclubs, bars, restaurants, galleries. Lots of vacant lots where buildings have been torn down and nothing put up in their place, or where projects have been abandoned. And lots of apartment buildings boarded up, or covered in scaffolding, or the ubiquitous netting they use to cover building fronts when they’re under renovation, or nearby buildings are. It’s fertile ground for Valencia’s very active street artists, but doesn’t make for pretty streetscapes.

I’d forgotten how much I like this neighbourhood. I’ve been trying to analyze why I like it so much. Why am I attracted to grottiness? I suspect many people would be repulsed by Carmen. It’s not a clean place. And why am I attracted to supposedly illegal, often quite silly street art and graffiti (see above)? I think it’s probably a combination of a few things.

For starters, I like the sense that people have been living in this place for so long, and that all their histories in a sense are overlaid on its fabric. Even if most of those histories are invisible now, there are tantalizing archaeological clues: the ghostly shape of a long destroyed building on a blank wall, some with faded, worn remnants of the painted walls that were once inside somebody's apartment. You occasionally even see wallpaper clinging to what once was an interior wall. Then there are the layers and layers of paint and posted bills on the walls and hoardings – and drainpipes.

The lettering says, 'Bonjour Tristesse' (hello sadness - but also a reference to the French novel by a teenaged Francoise Sagan) which the character on the platform is spray painting on the wall.

This is part of the appeal of the street art too; there are layers of it in this city. Mutual respect among artists and graffitists – the taggers and vandals as distinct from the more legitimate (to my mind) Banksy-style artists – appears to be hit and miss. Very little of the art is considered sacred apparently. Given that it was often painted over by city officials in the past, the artists themselves probably never expected their work to last.

A few of the cleverer things I saw and liked four years ago have survived (including the ones in the image above), but a lot is gone, and what’s left of it is rarely undamaged. You get street art painted over with tagging, but still showing underneath or around the edges. Some of my favourite pieces have been completely obliterated. We went down one street today where there was an interesting drawing I remember from four years ago, by one of the more prolific local street artists. It was still intact, but now mostly hidden by a wheeled garbage bin! As I’ve said, I don’t think the quality of the work is generally as good as it was, and there is more tagging, which I find boring.

I wonder too if, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed a keener appreciation of decay in the environment because it mirrors the decay I see in myself. Fancful thought maybe. The hopeful thing about the decay in Carmen is that, despite it, the place is still inhabited and vibrant, full of life, in fact. (As am I, I hope, and the rest of us wrinklies.) Carmen is actually a young place. Middle-aged, middle class people for the most part don’t live here. The demographic appears to be students, the unemployed young – of which Spain has a super abundance – and counter-culture types.

My favourite of the pieces I spotted yesterday, by Lolo.

And there is some development going on here. Not all the projects have been abandoned. Dumpsters full of old plaster and woodwork are a common sight. (Of course, who knows how long they’ve been sitting there?) As we were walking down one street yesterday, a trio of young men were lowering a huge piece of battered old moulding or something from an upper window. It was dangling on the end of a rope, banging against the wall as it came down. It reminded me of the time Brian McCann and I lowered an old bathtub from the upstairs balcony of our house in Stratford, almost killing Brian. These guys, I would guess, were also do-it-yourselfers, probably fixing up an apartment on the cheap.

You also occasionally come on historical buildings in Carmen that have been beautifully restored: an imposing 16^th or 17^th century building, now part of the Catholic University of Valencia, for example, and the church in the Plaza del Carmen, with its lovely baroque facade cleaned and repainted since we were here last. (Hmm, common theme there: the country and the city may be broke, but the church still has money.)

Carmen church

Anyway, I enjoyed the walk, and the picture taking.

Today, before noon – a big breakthrough in our effort to get going a little earlier – we headed back over to the Centro Cultural Bancaja. Entrance is free, and there are several new exhibits each year, often with work drawn from the foundation’s own, apparently vast, collection. The one we started viewing today was titled Picasso y el museo, about the influence of museum visits on Picasso’s work, starting at a young age, but all through his life. I’m not a huge Picasso fan, but I do love the prints. It’s a medium in which he was incredibly prolific. This exhibit is mostly about the prints, a lot of them made in the 1960s and early 1970s, a lot of them owned by the foundation.

'Portrait Of A Man With A Ruff, Variation After El Greco,' colour linocut, 1962

So much creativity, such fantastic facility for drawing – and etching and aquatinting! If you just glance at them, they look almost scribbled, but look closer and you see all the character and humour in the figures, and the economy of lines used. The compositions are often jammed full, but always hang together, beautifully proportioned. A lot of the prints on display may never have been shown publicly when Picasso first made them; they’re incredibly raunchy. Many are depictions of historical artists at work painting their models. In Picasso, the female models are invariably naked, not demurely nude as in the originals. In fairness, the artists are sometimes shown nude as well.

Part of Suite 347, 1968

Karen and I were there about 45 minutes when I started feeling the onset of art fatigue – where your eyes start to glaze over and you’re no longer capable of fully appreciating what you’re seeing. We thought, well, this is the beauty of this place: we can come back as many times as we like and look at the rest of it – it’s a huge exhibit, over 200 pieces. As long as we come in the morning or late afternoon or evening.

So we left and went home for lunch. I think we’re about to go out restaurant hunting. Karen has compiled a list of recommended places and wants to go and scout them. Not for tonight, but for lunch someday soon.

***

We did go out again, but only to one of the restaurants, one not far from here, well out of touristed areas. But it was shuttered – it being a non-meal time. The others were all too far away to walk to tonight. We settled for strolling over to the city hall square. We went via a health food store where I was able to find some decent oats and ground flax seed. (Very expensive.) We sat in front of city hall in the gloaming, but only briefly as the blustery wind was irritating. Besides, the lure of wine and food was drawing us home.

By the way, sharp-eyed readers will have noticed: we are having some cloudy days right now - in Valencia! I know. But it continues to be mild. The high today was over 20°C.