Nogueras Blanchard is very pleased to announce the third chapter of Paired Histories. Continuing the experimental curatorial programme we have been developing over recent years, this season will be overseen by Joaquín García Martín, founder of the former Madrid gallery garcía | galería. Proposing relationships between various artists and literary figures and works, this cycle presents another look at some of the key artists showcased by the gallery between 2012 and 2020 in Doctor Fourquet, Madrid.

Death in Spring is a posthumous novel by acclaimed Catalan author Mercè Rodoreda (Barcelona, 1908 – Gerona, 1983) that narrates the life cycle of its protagonist in the context of a small, closed village. Set in a fictional rural world tied to nature and its cycles, the novel presents a society ruled by sacrificial rituals and traditions which are as cruel as the natural world that surrounds them, and where the individual loses out to the needs and welfare of the collective.

André Romão (Lisbon 1984) has also examined astonishment, cruelty and transformation in his recent work, notably in his cycle which revolves around the classical myth of the Metamorphoses and the writings of Ovid, and which the artist presented in the project “Fauna” at the Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon in 2019. The work method he employed in this cycle is the same as that which Mercè Rodoreda used in her novel, with the union of apparently disparate elements forcing us to look at the world from another perspective. In his case, Romão dwells with special interest on the tactile and the sensory, using the physical as a point of entry into systems of representation.