What if we lose our fear of art?
For someone not used to visiting museums, the mere idea of getting started can be overwhelming. Huge, brimming with knowledge and dressed in an aura of seriousness, there are those who give up without trying. Like when after hours diving between Netflix, HBO and Amazon Prime, you end up turning off the TV out of sheer indecision.
From that not knowing where to start, with hints of respect that invites distance, they realized Gonzalo Pascual Mayandía and Marta Redondo Carmena , the creators of dear museum , a project born as “a place where explore readings around art that are closer and more inspiring for people”.
With many years behind them in the field of museography and cultural institutions, Pascual and Redondo claim a new way of approaching art, free of preconceived ideas and with curiosity and emotion as its flag.
To do this, they created this online platform, which can be consulted via Instagram or through their website, where with their regular publications they show us how art, also he who reckons his age by centuries, It can serve to understand the current situation somewhat better (it also applies in reverse) and establish connections with other disciplines and creations, a priori, in the antipodes.
In Querido Museo "we share with our visitors different, fresh, interesting, fun, critical and personal readings about the works of art that we like the most," Pascual and Redondo tell Traveler.es. Or did you expect to find Yves Klein's Anthropométrie sans titre and Rogier Van der Weyden's The Descent together, seasoned with a little Rubén Darío?
In fact, it is in this connection capacity where Pascual and Redondo consider that lies the richness of a work of art. "The other option is to stay with the usual card..."
A gift for spirits always ready to be curious and amazed, without fear of breaking their schemes. “You have to approach Querido Museo with a relaxed attitude. With eyes and senses wide open. And ready to be surprised, to participate in the debate”.
And it is that Pascual and Redondo seek, among other things, surprise in the works and themes they deal with. “Some of the works that we comment on are known by all, great milestones in the history of art, and others, on the other hand, they are works and/or artists that are much less known but that we are very interested in disseminating and valuing”, they explain.
The surprise factor would come with those stories they build, enriching the strictly academic, creating connections with other disciplines and providing views from different perspectives. "Of course, always from the rigor and knowledge, leaving aside the obvious and the banal."
They have for this deployment with the Here and Now section, with information pills as required today; and with another three where weekly they delve into some aspect.
A) Yes, Wunderkammer it would become his cabinet of curiosities in which works of art, literature, poetry, music and cinema intermingle; in Love they fantasize about falling in love between artists and works that never met; and in intruders They invite relevant people in their profession, but outside the art world, to comment, with a very personal point of view, on a work.
The former mayor of Madrid Manuela Carmena was in charge of opening it talking about The Dukes of Osuna and their children (Francisco Goya). Behind her, the filmmaker Andrea Jaurrieta with Christina's World (Andrew Wyeth); The architect Fernando Porras-Island with The Battle of San Romano (Paolo Uccello); and the author of the book El Jardín del Prado, Edward Beard , with Saint John the Baptist and the Franciscan Master of Werl/ Saint Barbara (Robert Campin).
An attractive miscellany so that, after going through Querido Museo, you turn on that spark that pushes us to new ways of relating to art, that pushes us to incorporate it into our lives.
“Both in the way of studying the History of Art and in the way of approaching it, historiography has had an important weight, which is fundamental, but It has made us perceive art as a succession of schools or styles that are often disconnected from each other and, above all, from our own reality”. tell Pascual and Redondo.
In fact, both consider that we are immersed in a moment of change in which museums are aware that they need incorporate new narratives into their collections and exhibitions that are more attractive and that allow them to connect with new audiences.
“A good example is the exhibition guests of the Prado Museum that proposes a reflection on the way in which the established powers defended and propagated the role of women in society through the arts, and thus introduces a very lively and very current debate in the theaters”, point.
And yes, in your opinion, academic and new discourses can coexist, the street debate can enter the art galleries. “Both are necessary for museums to be living spaces. But the latter, today are more necessary than ever” to attract that young audience that will have to fill their theaters in the future.
Those rooms that Pascual and Redondo define as a place of pleasure, quoting Professor Ángel González. “Painting deals with our physical, bodily sensations. Art recreates the sensations of being physically in the world. It is something of a physiological order”.
Considering that being in the world has become somewhat difficult in recent times, it is not surprising that we have noticed the consolation that art can give us and that we are unraveling the mystery of how to immerse ourselves in it.
“I would encourage everyone to forget a little about prejudices: one has to go to the museum and not have many certainties. That's exactly what's fun. Almost explore the museum, don't even take a map, don't take the entrance brochure. Calmly launch and stand: take time to see what's behind it”, recommends Pascual.
“And if you don't like it, nothing happens. There may be a painting that is officially wonderful and that you don't like, just like you don't like a book or you don't like a song. You have to live it from your own person”, Redondo assures and then underlines that now is, precisely, a very good time to enter museums.
“First, for helping them, but, above all, because you enjoy a lot that there are few people, and you see things that before maybe you couldn't even stop to see them because of the number of people there. Yes, he talks about the museums in our own city. Those that are so hard for us to step on.
Who knows, maybe Querido Museo is to art what the Merlí series has been to philosophy, a vehicle to make us understand that these disciplines can do more for our daily lives than we think.