Historias del arte

This comic is a compendium of stories, but also a parody of the classic art history books, and for this reason it recovers a structure similar to theirs, with the story divided into two large blocks: "Ancient painting" and "Latest painters ". "Ancient Painting" is made up of three chapters that address stories of spiritual terror whose characters will appear again in the second part, as if they were specters from the past determined to come back to life. The enormous sacrifice of Deir El-Medina is a fable set in Ancient Egypt, around 1335 BC, in which the culture of sacrifices and funerary monuments coexists with the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten, the prototype of a romantic character. The Disappearance of the Dunhuang Manuscripts is about manuscript illuminators in Buddhist monasteries during the Buddhist persecution in China around AD 845, set in the desert as the scene of material scarcity and spiritual fertility, with a maddened king of Ancient China as a trigger for further destruction. For his part, Akhenaten at Amarna is an enlarged detail of the pharaoh's most hallucinatory period, in which his mystical delusions converge with the collapse of his empire. The second part, "Last Painters", is a reference to the idea of ??the end of painting and focuses on the biographies of two artists, the Canadian painter Agnes Martin and the German painter Blinky Palermo, both exponents of silent and minimalist painting. . Agnes Martin in the Desert focuses on the seven-year period (between 1967 and 1974) in which the artist left painting and went to live in the desert. The narration oscillates between a nightmare and a miraculous vision, and we see narrated in the first person experiences common to people forced into processes of loneliness and profound internal transformation, and which inevitably evoke the recent collective experience of confinement. Blinky Palermo in the Maldives tells of the brief vacation that the painter took in the Maldives in 1977, during which he died under strange circumstances. This last chapter also delves into post-war European art and concludes with a speculative and poetic approach to the disappearance of the artist.