Don Kikhot, 2017-19

Painting
Projection screen 100 x 100 cm.

The film Don Kikhot (1957) was the first Russian film shot in cinemascope and the first colour film directed by Grigori Kozintsev. The artistic advisor and set designer for the film was the Spanish artist Alberto Sánchez, who was living in exile in Moscow at the time. One of Alberto’s merits was to make the Crimean landscape resemble that of the lands of La Mancha.

This work replicates, by means of a painting on a projection screen, the frame that begins the film, where the title Don Kikhot, written in Cyrillic letters, appears superimposed on a landscape of La Mancha painted by Alberto himself.

The intention to freeze this sequence is evidence, on the one hand, of the cold atmosphere, with greenish tones, with which the film captures the landscape of La Mancha, when it should be warm or golden, and on the other, of the creative paralysis in which Alberto lived in exile when he renounced avant-garde art in order to submit to Stalinist realism. A tragic renunciation that contains a paradox: according to Kozintsev, ‘no one was more like Don Quixote than Alberto himself’.

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Exhibition:
Theoretics of bread
Rosa Santos Gallery. Valencia. From 20 September to 22 November 2019.