This entry is a translation into English, by AltaLingua, of my text originally written in Spanish («Los misterios de Mariajosé Gallardo»), published in the catalogue of the exhibition of the work of Mariajosé Gallardo Aprended, mortales, a buscar las cosas del cielo [Learn, o mortals, to seek out the things of heaven] by the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (MEIAC), Badajoz, 2023, pp. 75-82.
Aprended, mortales, a buscar las cosas del cielo [Learn, o mortals, to seek out the things of heaven] is the title of an installation by Mariajosé Gallardo[1] (Villafranca de los Barros, Badajoz, 1978), which from its very title is closely related to the figure of the proto-founder of the University of Seville, from which Faculty of Fine Arts Gallardo graduated in 2001. This was Rodrigo Fernández de Santaella, born in Carmona, in 1444 and died in Seville in 1509[2].
Indeed, the title of Gallardo’s installation comes from the inscription on the tomb of Fernández de Santaella[3]. And, even more, both the exhibition space and the way the distribution of the paintings and other elements is carried out constitute a re-creation, albeit not in any way faithful, of the chapel in which the founder is interred[4]. It is the only building that is still standing of the Jesuit College of Santa Maria, an institution of ecclesiastical study inspired in the College of San Clemente de los Españoles, in Bologna, where Fernández de Santaella had been an intern in his youth for eight years[5]. Although his efforts were directed at setting up a university, he did not manage to finish the process of its institution. Nevertheless, the University of Seville would be founded, finally, following the canon’s pioneering initiative. An eminent theologian, author of the highly influential Vocabularium ecclesiasticum (Seville, 1499)[6], Fernández de Santaella was also responsible for a translation of the Libro de Marco Polo[7], of which there are various modern editions, and the author of Tratado de la inmortalidad del ánima (Treatise of the immortality of the soul) (Seville, 1503), and of Breve tratado q[ue] se llama de bien morir (Brief treatise called the good death) which he wrote very shortly before his own death[8].
His chapel was inaugurated in May 1506, receiving the mortal remains of Rodrigo Fernández de Santaella, deceased, as his tombstone says, on 20 January 1509. The central painting of his retable, the work of Alejo Fernández, presents the Virgen de la Antigua[9] and the founder himself, offering, as is frequent in Gothic painting, a depiction in miniature of the architectural work paid for and dedicated to a religious figure[10].
Mariajosé Gallardo, however, has not appropriated the original iconography of the painting in her installation Aprended, mortales, a buscar las cosas del cielo, which is inspired, specifically, by the interior of the chapel, which has a single nave, a rectangular plan and an altarpiece with two levels and five panels each. The installation consists of a pictorial complex –the installation’s paintings are painted in oils, lacquer and gold leaf on canvas– which simulates a retable[11], and opposite which a set of four altar candelabras has been placed –which come from the Iglesia de Todos los Santos (Church of All Souls) in Santiago de Compostela and whose candles, as dictated by the canonical rules, are made of beeswax, and which have been used for worship, have been loaned by the Brotherhood of the Holy Cross of Seville–, in addition to other paintings hung on the side walls, and a total of fourteen wrought iron items. A figure that is the same as the number of stations of the Via Crucis – and indeed, with the exception of its retable, the interior of the Chapel of Santa María de Jesús has not other artistic adornment than a Via Crucis – a repertoire that is frequently executed in multi-coloured bas reliefs, and which is to be found in all churches to visually signify the route of Jesus Christ to the crucifixion on Calvary, or Golgotha;
Since the earliest times, Christians have had the custom of retracing the painful route, starting at the Praetorium of Pilate all the way to Calvary. This devotion spread around the world and was ultimately defined as the Via Crucis in 14 stations, mainly due to the work of the Franciscans. The Popes have strongly recommended this exercise, granting it numerous indulgences[12].
Gallardo, however, does not repeat specific allusions in these fourteen bars, more or less personal in their visual diction, to the canonical elements of the stations of the cross, so they do not match exactly those of the Catholic rite. Rather, the iconographic paraphernalia has a syncretic character, as also occurs in all of the pictorial works present in the installation. For these fourteen elements, Gallardo has used wrought iron, as we mentioned, and all of her creations are made to her own designs by a workshop in Villafranca de los Barros, the Badajoz town where she was born.
As far as the pictorial works of her installation are concerned, Gallardo has achieved a unified appearance based on their black backgrounds, on which diverse figurative elements are cut out with an irregularly naturalist diction. The overall impression is thus one of a catalogue of images that form not so much compositions as juxtapositions, achieving in this way a sort of visual encyclopaedia, virtually devoid of text. In this regard, two works of identical format stand out for their exceptionality, compositionally alike, as if setting up a diptych, in which she has painted two propositions in their respective centres, furthermore adorned with flowers, as if they were pages from a florist’s catalogue, and feature verses of the Our Father in its original composition in Latin. The work is titled Fiat voluntas tva (Thy Will Be Done), and In saecula saeculorim (Unto the Ages of Ages), the closing phrase of the prayer[13].
As a whole, the plastic configuration of the pictorial works that comprise the installation powerfully recall certain modes of the narrative figuration of Eduardo Arroyo (Madrid, 1937-2018)[14], although those of Gallardo seem to us to be visually more attractive and appealing in their comical quality and their paradoxical profundity. There are many depictions of flowers, birds (such as partridges or storks) in the paintings present in the exhibition, and other animals such as rabbits, and, in particular, a black cat. An ambiguity between the domestic and the symbolic-magical. There is, indeed, in the pictorial and sculptural elements of the installation an ambivalent ceremony of propitious nature, agriculture, civilization, for which Gallardo has referenced different festive traditions, such as the men of straw that celebrate the harvests in central European traditions. But, at the same time, there is a metastasis of the disguise, of the imposture, as occurs with magnificent intelligence in the denouncing of the growing replacement of reflection on death and the veneration of ancestors with a merely consumerist ethos, and thus all the more ideatic or idiotic, such as the dictatorship of Halloween, regarding which it comments in the depiction of fancy dress costumes that ridicule respect for the dead. The Halloween costumes that appear in several of these paintings manifest the astonishment at the growing massification of this celebration (unheard of in her childhood, as in ours) and the gradual dismantling of the “retreat” of the festivity of All Saints. An extraordinarily eloquent illustration of the ways in which the market has become the new religion.
Mariajosé Gallardo, creator of an extremely individual painting that is frequently playful, and even humorous, at the same time sinister, encompasses the exercise of pictorial art, as that which “requires almost a monk-like state”, and has referred to her studio as a “cave”. Painting is, in short, “her religion”[15]. A novel characteristic of its programmatic character in comparison with her previous output lies in the presence of black monochromatic backgrounds, in contrast to her usual convincing spatial ambiences, in spite of the fact that, in its plastic elements, more than pursuing naturalism, Gallardo makes expressively rough and even charicaturistic depictions. These backgrounds, as well as highlighting the juxtaposed elements on the pictorial surface, reference, as Gallardo explains, the darkening of church paintings as a result of the omnipresence in bygond times of lighted candle smoke, today replaced by electric lighting.
Many of the elements are easily identifiable to those who are familiar with Christian symbolism, and even to those are not. Thus, for example, one of the largest paintings (measuring 146 x 114 cm) depicts, in an extraordinary synthesis, almost graphic, the fire that devastated Notre-Dame Cathedral between 15 and 16 April 2019, times which coincided, curiously, with Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week (Easter). A fire that, among other destructions, caused the collapse of the spire, in a neo-Gothic style, which was 96 metres high. Nevertheless, many other elements of the installation remain wrapped in a halo of mystery, referencing personal experiences regarding which Gallardo does not explicitly say anything, didactically before the viewer. Something similar happens in the universe of the titan Ezra Pound, whose poetry has recently been commemorated on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, in which extraordinarily heterogeneous historical references were combined with anecdotes of his own life journey. But no, Mariajosé Gallardo’s painting is not a work that requires an instruction manual for its decipherment, as happens, on the contrary, with a good part of contemporary proposals, as alembic as they are inane. Gallardo aims to open up in the viewer an invitation to mystery, which is also an invitation to self-discovery.
Finally, and in an twist of symmetry, we close the work as we did at the beginning, alluding to the titles. If at the beginning of this writing we did so with regard to the installation created by Mariajosé Gallardo in the MEIAC, we will allude on this occasion to the title we gave to these first words about the fascinating and intelligent visual world of this painter: The new mysteries of Mariajosé Gallardo. And, thus, we bid farewell to the reader with the reminder that, if The Holy Rosary is divided into fifteen Mysteries[16] into three sets of five each: Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious[17], Gallardo’s works are imposed on us as novel mysteries. An enigma that interrogates us and exhorts us. It questions us because all contemplation leads to reflection, to introspective practice. To a meditation, even. She exhorts us, too, because the title that our painting has chosen is already an imperative enunciation. Both for those who know and practice it, and for those who do not know it, Gallardo/Fernández de Santaella remind us how necessary it is to notice, in times like ours of dismantling, transcendence. Not so much escapism, but in a return home. And, in this way, as a whole, Learn, o mortals, to seek out the things of heaven amounts, in its syncretic character, to a fertile reflection on the dismantling of the humanist tradition in our societies that seem to be heading, in a perpetual Carnival, to the slaughterhouse.
[1] Name with which María José Gallardo Soler has signed her works ever since she saw it written in this incorrect way in a letter she received.
[2] For a biographical study of the “Presbyter, Master of Arts and Holy Theology, Protonotary of the Apostolic See, Canon and Archdeacon of the Holy Mother Church of Seville”, as stated on his tomb, see Joaquín Hazañas y la Rua,: Maese Rodrigo Fernández de Sanataella, fundador de la Universidad de Sevilla. Seville, published by Imprenta de Izquierdo y Comp.a, 1900. This short work of some fifty pages was published to commemorate the inauguration of a commemorative sculpture dedicated to the founder of the college in the courtyard of the University of Seville, which took place on 10 December that year. It was the work of Joaquín Bilbao Hazañas, Rector of the University of Seville in1904 and 1921. He concludes his analysis precisely by referring to the statue, in a synthesis of the edifying character of the work of Fernández de Santaella, whom he sets up as a model for those who are dedicated to culture: “Maese Rodrigo, even as a statue, strives to do good. What splendour, the virtue that is the sun that never sets!” Cf. p. 46.
[3] The end of the inscription, which is what Gallardo recalls, reads as follows, in the original Latin:
DISCITE MORTALES CELES
TIA QVRERE NOSTRA HEC
IN CINERES TANDEM
GLORIA TOTA REDIT.
See Joaquín Hazañas y la Rua: Maese Rodrigo Fernández de Sanataella. Op. cit., p. 19.
[4] Gallardo continues in this way the installation approach that she offered in her intervention in the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (i. e. Andalusian Centre of Contemporary Art), titled Non Sine Sol Iris (There is no rainbow without the sun) in 2015. The CAAC, as numerous spaces devoted to contemporary art, has been founded recently in Spain, occupy an old, deconsecrated monastery complex: the monastery of la Cartuja de Santa María de las Cuevas.
[5] Pope Julius II, in a papal bull issued on 12 July1505, authorised the building of the College; cf. “Bvlla Prima Institvtionis dicti Collegij”, compiled in Constitutiones Collegii Maioris Sanctae Mariae de Iesu, Studii Generalis et Universitatis Hispalensis. Seville, Francisco de Lyra, 1636, pp. 46-48. A work that possesses, among other documentary jewels, two versions of the last will and testament of the founder, one in Spanish and one in Latin (pp. 53-57, and 58-60, respectively). For a history of the College of Santa María de Jesús, see, Francisco Aguilar Piñal: Historia de la Universidad de Sevilla. Seville, Secretariado de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Sevilla, 1991, pp. 11-54.
[6]Although little known today, it was one of the milestones of Spanish lexicography that commenced in the Renaissance, together with the Universal vocabulario of Alonso Fernández de Palencia (Seville, 1490), and the Diccionario latino-español (Salamanca, 1492) and Vocabulario español latino (Salamanca, c. 1495), both by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. For a study of this matter, cf., Antonia María Medina Guerra: Las ediciones del Vocabularium seu lexicon ecclesiasticum de Rodrigo Fernández de Santaella y Diego Jiménez Arias (1499-1798). Malaga, Servicio de Publicaciones e Intercambio Científico de la Universidad de Málaga, 1998; from which we take the following passage for its wealth of Information: “Santaella’s dictionary is not an extensive work, as it records more than some 7,000 entries. All of them, with a few exceptions, are in Latin, as it is a mono-directional dictionary that is only useful for translating from Latin into Romance languages, and not the other way round. Fernández de Santaella’s great contribution to Spanish lexicography lies in the careful selection of the headwords and in the meticulous indications in the various meanings with which they appear in the bible passages and in the most widely read ecclesiastical authors.” (p. 13).
[7] El libro [del] famoso Marco paulo veneciano [de]las cosas marauillosas q̄ vido en las partes oriētales, conuiene saber en las indias, Armenia, Arabia, Persia [e] Tartaria. E del poderio del gran Can y otros reyes. Cō otro tratado de Micer pogio florētino que trata de las mesmas tierras [e] islas (Seville, 1518).
[8] Whose manuscript, 23 pages, dated 1509, the year of his death, is held by the Biblioteca Nacional de España (National Library of Spain).
[9] A title intrinsically related to the reconquest of Seville by King Ferdinand III, the Saint, in 1248. Its iconography is that of the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus in her arms. In her other hand, Mary holds a white rose. Seville Cathedral has a chapel (the largest on its southern side), dedicated to this title, whose painting is, naturally, the central motif of its retable.
[10] A phylactery issues from the mouth of the offerant, which reads: TVA SVNT OMNIA ETQVAE, DE MANV TVA ACCEPIMVS REDDIMVS TIBI (Everything we receive from your hand is returned to you).
[11] The retable is incomplete. A design has been arranged that marks its structure, but of the ten spaces that comprise it, only three (and none of the central ones) receive images. In lower section, a frieze of nine is offered; on this occasion, there are three missing pieces.
[12] José Luis de Urrutia: Nuevo Devocionario. Madrid, Stvdivm ediciones, 1976, p. 326. The work goes into detail for each of the fourteen stations of the rite between pp. 326 and 334. The rite thus amounts to a sort of idealised “camino” [as in the Way of Saint James] in which the believer accompanies Christ on his route to Calvary. The Jesuit theologian subtitles his work, which has seven hundred pages, very eloquently as Guía de caminantes (Guide for walkers of the way).
[13] The sole remaining example refers to the graffiti that a devoted follower made on the outer wall of a cemetery to lament the death of a football player who has come to be deified by some of his fans: the ill-fated Diego Armando Maradona, called by some «the hand of God». The prayer reads as follows: E non sanno che se só perso (They do not know what they have lost).
[14] We undertook an analysis of the issue in the chapter “Eduardo Arroyo, mythographer of decadence”, pp. 157-240 of our doctoral thesis, unpublished, El apropiacionismo en la pintura española contemporánea, (Appropriationism in contemporary Spanish painting) defended at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (Department of Aesthetics and Theory of the Arts) of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Autonomous University of Madrid) in 2008. The doctoral thesis was awarded the Extraordinary Doctorate Prize in Philosophy and Letters by the Autonomous University of Madrid.
[15] All of the statements between quote marks come from a conversation with the painter on 16 December 2022.
[16] The Mysteries are identified with particularly important events in the lives of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.
[17] The Joyful stations are: «The Incarnation of the Son of God» (Lk 1:26-38), «The Visitation of Our Lady» (Lk 1:39-56), «The Birth of the Son of God» (Lk 2:1-20), «The Presentation of the Child Jesus in the Temple» (Lk 2:22-40), and «The Lost Child already found in the Temple» (Lk 2:41-52). The Sorrowful ones are «The Prayer of the Garden» (Mk 14:32-42), «The Scourging of the Lord» (Mk 15:1-15), «The Crowning of Thorns» (Mk 15:16-20), «The Cross on His Back» (Mk 15:21-26), and «The Crucifixion and Death of the Lord» (Mk 15:29-39). Finally, the Glorious stations are: «The Resurrection of the Lord» (Mt 28:1-8), «The Ascension of the Lord» (Acts 1:6-11), «The Coming of the Holy Spirit» (Acts 2:1-13), «The Assumption of Our Lady» (Rev 12:1), and «The Coronation of Our Lady» (Lk 1:46-50). Cf, José Luis de Urrutia: Nuevo Devocionario. Op. cit., pp. 231-240.
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