EDUARDO ARROYO

“Eduardo Arroyo. Painting Literature” is a journey through 193 works that the National Prize of Fine Arts 1982 has made since 1965 in various disciplines (painting, drawing, books, lithographs and set design), with the common denominator they're all connected to literature.  

This is the first review  in the Balearic Islands of the Spanish artist's work. The exhibition is divided into three halls: the large paintings; the books written, illustrated or created by the artist, and his sceneries; the papers and graphic works. Smoothly, the exhibition reflects the close relationship that the artist has developed between his painting and literature. Visitors will check what the artist has always declared: his fascination with literature and his continuous struggle with painting.   

The exhibition is a display of the writers and characters that have inspired him throughout his extensive career. They are very special authors, authentic examples of life and death, to whom he pays tribute with his portraits, but they are also myths from childhood and myths of maturity, which he turns intensely plastic. Visitors to the exhibition will see how the frontiers between painting and literature become blurred. Before their eyes, the great Spanish painter transforms the meaning of the book, of the character and of the life it refers to into his gaze, but even more amazingly, he also transforms the audience’s gaze. Surprise and scandal, the characters and their story continue to crystallize, in a specific scene, elements that are in the life and in the work, in the book and in the biography, and very often in the death of the writer. They’re elements which appear in the painting, forming their own iconography, valid signs within their own system that are valid in the narration of the painting and in Eduardo Arroyo’s iconographic system.  

Those who approach the exhibition Baluard discover the portraits of Cicero, Stendhal, Flaubert, Leopoldo Alas 'Clarín', Balzac, Nabokov, Verlaine, Benjamin, Joyce, Zweig and Hasenclever, among many others, and popular characters like Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Pinocchio, Bluebeard or Don Juan Tenorio. All of them, with the personal component of Arroyo.  

Location-Hall: Floor 0
Production: Es Baluard Museu d'Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma