The opening.

Last night, at the IVAM, the light fell slowly over the rooms as if it wanted to listen before illuminating.

The opening—more ritual than event—opened a threshold where the Spanish 1950s breathed again, shaking off the dust of the archive to reveal themselves with the almost animal smoothness of a newborn painting.

There was a restrained vibration in the air, as if each visitor, whether from Valencia, Spain, or abroad, carried with them a different echo of what it means to look.

The paintings—between incandescent informalism and academic discipline that still retained the shadow of plaster—were not simple pieces: they were surfaces that learned to speak to each other. They had been hung as if someone had wanted to hear the exact moment when matter finally accepts its own form, and form, surrendered, returns to the body that looks at it a question that is never asked aloud:

What part of me is made of the same tremor as this canvas?

The exhibition, orchestrated with almost liturgical rigor, did not propose a discourse; rather, it invited a misalignment. That kind of Lacanian precision in which the subject stumbles upon the crack that founds it and, instead of looking away, stays there, breathing into the void that explains it.

The attendees—collectors, students, historians, artists, curious onlookers, and witnesses to themselves—moved with an almost choreographed respect. It seemed as if each body was trying to adjust its breathing to the tectonic rhythm of the works. Some stopped in front of an oil painting as if they were going to confession. Others scanned from work to work, gathering invisible connections between eras, like someone searching an old map for the route that will take them home.

The curatorship, subtle and unobtrusive, posed a question that still lingers in the room, clinging to the walls like luminous dampness:

Can painting teach us to see what we never knew how to name?

In that back-and-forth between form and escape, an almost therapeutic gesture was drawn.

There was something neuroplastic about how visitors reorganised their visual memory, opening new internal grooves with each chromatic impact. And there was something reconciliatory about how the gaze was carried away, without fear, to the time when these works emerged: a country that was trying to think itself while it still could not say itself.

The night ended without announcing its end.

The voices faded away like embers falling into a bowl.

The IVAM was enveloped in a warm silence, the kind that heals rather than breaks, because it sustains without demanding, because it understands before it asks.

And as the lights were turned off, a faint but firm certainty filled the air:

That looking back at history is not a step backwards,

but rather a way of reorganising the present so that the future —that shy animal—

dares to walk through the door.

Atreverse a más. Valencia antes del arte normativo. 1947-1960 - IVAM