José Luis Albelda

The exhibition "From mountains to adventitious" by José Albelda proposes a journey towards the small. Albelda shows an early interest towards the landscape and nature, however, in this exhibition he repairs what the painter and the traveller go unnoticed. The dictionary refers to them as the animal or vegetable organism that develops in an occasional and inconstant way. This could be the reason why the artist gives them value by covering them in gold leaf, a technique used in the baroque to ornament and magnify the treated paint. It is not surprising to see in Albelda reminiscences of the ancient Fra Angelico or Botticelli, as the curator of this exhibition, José Saborit, tells us. For that reason, we are left with the learning of the adventitious, which, in the words of the curator, says: "Anyone who knows how to admire, paint, bow down to the adventitious, will have understood something important, learning to look down or, better yet, to abdicate from verticality, to lie down at the same level with our eyes at the height of their stems, to remain living their time, contemplating the chalices and the seeds, and the flying kites. When we get up we will no longer be exactly the same, our perception of the scale and our hierarchy of values will have changed into something, perhaps decisive. "