Alberto Sánchez, the bricklayer from the Vallecas School who ended his days in Moscow

Alberto Sanchez (Toledo, 1895 – Moscow, 1962) was one of the first Spanish avant-garde sculptors. It was according to chronology and will continue to be so, due to its artistic talent and originality (along with Julio González It is Emiliano Barral). At the end of the 1920s he founded, with Benjamin Palencia and the often forgotten Pancho Lacethe Vallecas School, without a doubt, the best Spanish contribution to the aesthetics of the modern landscape. A combination of agrarian surrealism, telluric feeling and fidelity to the rugged landscape of the plateaufar from the verdolatry and sublimity in vogue.

proof of recognition of Alberto in his timeJust like its ideals, it was commissioned for a monumental sculpture for the entrance to the Spanish Republic pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition. Home It is be it housed, as we know, a mural of Picasso entitled guernica, among many other works by Spanish and foreign artists, who wanted to draw attention to the threat of the Republic's survival after the military uprising. But the uncivil war disturbed his biography: he traveled to Moscow as a drawing teacher for the children the Republic sent there with the aim of protecting them and never returned to Spain.

His figure has been claimed since the large exhibition dedicated to him by the Reina Sofía Museum in 2001. On that occasion, a replica of the aforementioned 1937 sculpture, which disappeared after the destruction of the pavilion, was erected in front of its façade. Its title could not be more (melancholically) expressive: The Spanish city has a path that leads to a star.

Alberto Sánchez, formerly a baker, shoemaker and plasterer, decides to continue working as a laborer in the pavilion, to complete the exhibition in record time.

The curators of the aforementioned pavilion intentionally set out to showcase, alongside works of art with capital letters, a selected sample of crafts: ceramics, basketry, esparto, implements and folk costumes. A plan consistent with the place that is popular, as a manifestation of a genuine, democratic and non-hierarchical cultureoccupied in republican ideology.

Everything that has been written so far is actually a prologue to contextualize the Cerezales Foundation exhibition. This is about analyze a gesture and an object: the gesture is that of Alberto Sánchez, formerly a baker, shoemaker and plasterer, who once his work as an artist (sculptor) was finished, decided to stay working as a laborer in the pavilion, to finish the exhibition in record time.

The object to be analyzed – which can be seen in the photographs of the rooms dedicated to crafts – are some beautiful shelves of unquestionable Albertian authorship, with their characteristic biomorphic profiles, so similar to his sculptures (but they were not art!). It goes without saying that the shelves disappeared with the demolition of the pavilion, but for the curator of this exhibition they serve as a raise a number of important questions, from the slippery distinction between the artistic and the artisan, to the artist's commitment to the contingent reality in which he lives. And they think about this through the chosen pieces.

[Nature, architecture and patronage]

Some are well known, such as the carpets collected by Teresa Lancet in the Moroccan Atlas, whose patterns become the motif of his own tapestries. Still in the textile field, a highly successful piece are the Spanish folk costumes, mounted on electric pottery wheels, which sequentially display their colorful and harmonious dance.

There are two somewhat symmetrical works: the suggestive video of Andrea Buttner about the German nuns whose modest craftsmanship becomes a line of refined designs – organic, minimalist, sustainable… everything that patience and poverty naturally produce. At the other extreme, traditional fishing gear made by the Irish artist gareth kennedy of Ikea furniture. A kind of return to the land of materials and designs that seemed to have lost all contact with it. The series of photographs by Emilio Arauxo of Galician artisans: their hands, so worked or laborious, became tools.

There is some other work that seems less suggestive to me. And you shouldn't miss the interview with Josefina Alix, the great expert on Alberto. But for me, discovery is the investigative work of nader koochaki about an exceptional character: Salvador RoblesAndalusian worker transplanted to the Leonese region in the 1980s, where he drove a bulldozer to level the large waste produced by mining.

Robles realized that, in those flattened wastelands, neither animals nor plants found refuge to settle. Thus, he dedicated his free time to placing large boulders that provided shade and humidity, in a work of earth art spontaneous or reconstruction of the landscape or protection of biodiversity… And it is that sometimes We lack words to describe what combines beauty, care and passion.

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