It has not yet happened to me that I have left a visit to CaixaForum Barcelona, whether to visit an exhibition, attend a series of conferences, a concert or any other event, and felt indifferent. And it is not only the architecture of Casa Ramona, but the feeling that I take something with me that I did not bring before. This, despite being able to confess that not all the exhibitions I have been to have I liked.
But delving into the proposal of Chez Matisse. The legacy of a new painting is, from the first moment, an exercise in openness, even lightness I would say, because the first thing that surprises the visitor is not only the chromatic explosion of the French genius, but the intelligent architecture of the exhibition itself, where the walls do not reach the ceiling, allowing air and gaze to circulate above the structures and generate a sense of spaciousness uncommon in exhibitions of this style.
This spatial design, which seems to emulate the compositional freedom of the artist himself, gives absolute prominence to the works, which float in an atmosphere of spaciousness and calm, reinforced by the choice of a soft salmon tone for the backgrounds that, far from competing with the palette of Henri Matisse, acts as a warm and constant embrace, a welcoming contrast that invites unhurried contemplation and is not at all disturbing, but rather a balm for the retina.
The exhibition, the result of a collaboration between the Centre Pompidou and the "la Caixa" Foundation, unfolds like an open house —hence that suggestive title of Chez Matisse— where the master not only lives, but receives a constellation of 45 of his own works and 49 by other artists in a dialogue that illuminates an entire century of avant-garde.
There is a particular beauty in the duality of visiting this exhibition from different perspectives. In a first bustling encounter, with my children, I allowed myself to rediscover Matisse through the purity of the brushstroke and the honesty of primary colors, stripping art of its intellectual armor to speak simply of sensations, of the everyday objects that populate the canvases and of how a splash of color can evoke a mood.
It is in that childlike gaze where decoration, a term Matisse never feared and proudly defended, regains its noblest meaning: as he himself said in 1945, the decorative is an essential quality that spreads joy and lightens our lives. Observing with my children the elements that appear in the paintings, I remembered that Matisse was born into a family of weavers and pigment merchants, something that explains his almost genetic mastery of texture and his ability to achieve that complex simplicity that fascinates us so much.
However, upon returning in the quietness of adult company, the discourse transforms and becomes denser, allowing the conversation to drift towards the construction of volume, the synthesis of landscape and that almost physical urge to want to cross the canvas to walk through the port and beaches of Collioure.
It is impossible not to establish an intimate parallel between those windows to the world that Matisse painted from his Paris apartment —those "door-windows" that are thresholds between the intimate and the unsettling— and the very window from which today I observe the Ronda Sant Antoni of Barcelona as I write these lines; a connection that crosses time and space, reminding us that Matisse's art is, above all, a way of looking at what remains on the other side of the glass.
"Painting is not only what is inside the frame, but that which spreads around it and allows us, at least for an instant, to feel that the world is a much warmer and lighter place"
The chronological journey, divided into eight sections, takes us from the somber beginnings under the influence of Gustave Moreau to the explosion of Fauvism, where the palette becomes incandescent after contact with the Mediterranean. I was impressed to see La Moulade there, that work that acted as a catalyst for his artistic revolution and which today still seems to retain the warmth of the 1905 sun.
Walking through the rooms of this exhibition is to encounter names that we usually see in art books and that here are presented as companions in struggles and experiences: the strength of André Derain, the almost humid intimacy of Marthe de Meligny's baths painted by Pierre Bonnard, the dynamism of the couple Sonia Delaunay and Robert Delaunay or the wild gaze of Maurice de Vlaminck. But perhaps the most enriching is the introduction of the female gaze through figures such as Sonia Delaunay, Natalia Goncharova or Françoise Gilot, who provide a necessary reflection on the limits of painting and the place of the feminine.
It is fascinating to see how Matisse, that man who needed "to touch ground before launching himself," according to historian Pierre Schneider, was able to connect with the German avant-gardes of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde, always seeking an emotional foundation for art, because, after all, for him modern art was nothing more than a "burst of the heart."
Special mention deserves the period of the wars, when his palette darkens and Matisse becomes obsessed with the motif of the window, an echo that resonates in the works of Kees van Dongen or František Kupka, and where the color black begins to function as a source of its own light, the famous black light that he discovered in Collioure in 1914.
"At the end of the tour, one feels that one has moved not only through the evolution of a pictorial language, but through the vital transits of a man who knew how to find calm in the midst of the storm of the 20th century"
Seeing his portraits of Greta Prozor or Auguste Pellerin, with those ghostly halos surrounding the figures, one perceives that transfer of energy between the artist and the model, an empathy that we also find in the work of Gilot, who shared with Matisse that tenderness towards everyday objects, unlike the imposing and transformative personality of Pablo Picasso, whose shadow also hovers over the exhibition in a duel of still lifes that is pure art history.
The section dedicated to cut-out papers (gouaches découpés) and their use in publications is, quite simply, the triumph of will over pain. It is moving to think that, when illness forced him to abandon brushes, Matisse did not give up, but transformed scissors into his new drawing tool, cutting directly onto color to resolve the eternal conflict between line and surface.
The twenty plates from the Jazz series exhibited at CaixaForum are a testament to hedonism and vitality; a luminous world built from physical deprivation that even influenced pop art and contemporary creators like Daniel Buren. Seeing those forms refined to their essence makes you understand that Matisse did not decorate walls, but invented a new way of inhabiting space, something that can be felt in the mediation area where visitors can, for a moment, emulate that creative process and unleash their own imagination, a total success so that art ceases to be something sacred and becomes something tactile and participatory.
At the end of the tour of Chez Matisse. The legacy of a new painting, one feels that one has moved not only through the evolution of a pictorial language, but through the vital transits of a man who knew how to find calm in the midst of the storm of the 20th century. I leave the exhibition with a strange mix of peace and longing. I feel that I want to escape for a few days to Collioure, walk through its cobbled streets, sit in a cafe in the afternoon and watch the sun set in its port, coloring the water with those colors that Matisse taught me to see. Or perhaps, simply, it will be enough for me to look out again at that window that shows me Barcelona, any Sunday in the Sant Antoni neighborhood, and discover that any landscape, if looked at as the master teaches us, always has something new to show us. Because as one feels in these rooms, painting is not only what is inside the frame, but that which spreads around it and allows us, at least for an instant, to feel that the world is a much warmer and lighter place.