The Art Observatory in Arnuero presents, from 11 July to 17 August, one of the most important exhibitions that can be seen this summer in Cantabria.
20 years after having exhibited in Arnuero, Cristóbal Toral returns with his suitcases to present “The journey of our time”, with a selection of 12 works that, from 1980 to 2022, maintain the same thread that has been constant in Toral’s creation: migration and travel.
A journey full of allegories and nuances, of mysteries, of noises and silences, but also of life and death. Toral, from the very beginning of his long artistic career, has focused on this vital transition—at times denouncing the injustices of immigration, other times alerting us to the exoduses caused by war conflicts, and still other times revealing scenes in which we can all feel recognised.
To unveil his message, the artist even turns suitcases and baggage into protagonists, without needing to include the human figure. Because, as José Saramago said: “A journey never ends. Only the travellers do. And they, too, can continue to exist in memory, in recollection, in narration. The purpose of a journey is only the beginning of another journey.”
The exhibition will include a carefully chosen selection of works from different years in which Cristóbal Toral develops the same theme of luggage, suitcases and solitude. From “Packed to travel” (1980) to “Ukrainian Station” (2022), we find various works that, in their own distinctive way, reinterpret what has almost become an obsession for the artist. Indeed, the artist himself publishes the book in 2003, “Life in a suitcase. Self-portrait of a painter”—a kind of autobiography in which he tells us why some of his favourite themes, among them his passion for suitcases, as the title itself attests, are accompanied by other travel elements such as stations and trains, with those sadly solitary women in the background.
On this occasion, under the title “The journey of our time”, Toral invites us to visit that journey he has shared for over 40 years with his suitcases, which fill everything: a room, a train carriage, or even a vast landscape of mountains. Eleven canvases and a sculpture, in which suitcases, packages and items ready to leave their usual dwelling—generally humble rooms in almost uninhabited houses—are present. And alongside this pile of suitcases, other icons from his visual creation, such as solitary women, take on understated prominence in the works, always in an attitude of waiting, and at times verging on the deepest despair or sadness. The final theme that also returns again and again is stations and train carriages—now not filled with suitcases, but with passengers who contemplate those abandoned pieces of luggage on the platform. The painter, then, transfers this metaphor to today’s most modern means of transport in his work “In the airport”, where the conveyor belt deposits dozens of suitcases surrounding a lone woman with her arms crossed, waiting for we do not know what. Toral does not fail to reflect, too, on one of the most brutal episodes of modern Europe: and thus in “Ukrainian Station”, the train—full of passengers—passes with indifference in front of a platform filled with luggage, and on this occasion too with fallen bodies, which form, in a severe and harsh way, a landscape of those who, sadly and unjustly, have not been able to reach the train of life in time to board it.
