FUNIBER and UNEATLANTICO's Cutlural Work, in collaboration with the Universidad Internacional Iberoamericana (International Iberoamerican University) (UNIB), the Municipality of San Juan, and the Consulate of Spain in Puerto Rico, inaugurates in the Sala Oller (Oller Hall) of the Museo de San Juan (Museum of San Juan), Puerto Rico, the exhibition "Goya and Dalí: from whimsy to nonsense” (Del Capricho al Disparate).
Present at the opening ceremony were Miguel Alberto Romero Lugo, Mayor of the City of San Juan; Maritere González, First Lady of the Municipality of San Juan; Josep María Bosch Bessa, Consul General of Spain; María del Carmen Rivera Rivas, UNIB Rector; and Luis Moisés Pérez, Director of the Museo de San Juan.
"It is a great opportunity to offer these collections so that the Puerto Rican community has the opportunity to appreciate art," said María del Carmen Rivera.
The exhibition will be open to the public until October 31, 2023 and can be visited from Wednesday to Saturday, between 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., and on Sunday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. In addition, as part of the exhibition, the museum has organized several conferences on various topics: Goyaesque aesthetics, the origin and development of modern art, the surrealist avant-garde, the medium of engraving, and the history of art.
The collection "Goya and Dalí: From Whimsy to Nonsense" is composed of 80 engravings by the Spanish painters Goya and Dalí and reflects the complex genius of Goya's art and the surreal universe, which Dalí integrated in perfect harmony with the scenes of Goya's whims.
In the words of Federico Fernández, director of FUNIBER's Cultural Work and curator of the exhibition From Whimsy to Nonsense, "Dalí, by transforming the Whims into surrealism, does nothing more than turn them into Nonsense, an operation that Goya had previously carried out by building his Nonsense from the accumulation of elements inherited from his graphic repertoire, leaving them devoid of their historical meaning, just as Dalí does with his Whims. The interest in Dalí would be enough to exhibit this series, but it also provides new and important information about Goya as a pictorial antecedent of surrealism. Dalí's intervention cannot be understood without reviewing the work of Goya's Nonsense, from which, according to our hypothesis, he extracts the resources and elements that, together with his own, are integrated into the scenes of the whims, turning them into nonsense".
