BRINGING HERITAGE CLOSER. TUDELA

5 September 2008

The Bardenas and La Mejana. Landscape and still life in Tudela's painting.
D. Manuel Motilva Albericio. Director of the Muñoz Sola Museum of Tudela.

La Mejana, an island in the river, is a territory of profound geographical personality and unequivocal demarcation that, despite its modernity (it dates back to the beginning of the 19th century), has contributed to define the identity of Tudela as a producer of excellent fruits of the orchard, making its name a synonym of quality and inseparable from that of the city itself: Tudela and its Mejana.

At a greater distance, to the northeast, are the Bardenas Reales, a vast territory of very unique and complex orography whose Quaternary clays are deeply shaped by the action of the wind, the rain and the extremes of its climate, which generates reliefs of multiple contrasts, capricious forms and violent backlighting.

Because of their distinguished aesthetic peculiarity, both landscapes have been taken by painters as the preferred subject of their paintings, thus contributing to make these landscapes referential and become signs of identity of our territory. The painters will return to them repeatedly to continuously renew their different aesthetic interpretation of them throughout the twentieth century.

Mejana, Bardenas, the Ebro, (with the bridge) and the Moncayo, (which closes to the south the natural limit of the landscape of La Ribera), are the four elements that make up the genuine identity of the aesthetic landscape of Tudela, to which painters have resorted as unavoidable elements of artistic reference letter , while the new pictorial trends notice a lesser interest in describing them.

With regard to the treatment of the still life by local painters, it can be noted that in their paintings the 'physical' nuance of the objects represented predominates, in that they try to enhance the sensory qualities of the same, multiplying to satiety the representation of the 'typical' products of the Tudela orchard: all class of fruits and vegetables but only some game, hardly any pictures of kitchens and very little attention to the pictures of flowers.

This exaltation of the sensorial, highly stimulated by public interest, makes it difficult for painters to work on the 'metaphysical' values of still life paintings, an aspect to which only painters with academic roots pay attention, since the current trends, mainly cultivated by young artists, focus their attention on the formal aspects of the still life and on the possibilities offered by the audiovisual media.
 

César Muñoz Sola, "Landscape of Las Bardenas".

César Muñoz Sola, "Still life with grapes".