Pavilion 7 of the Victoria Eugenia Palace, at the foot of the MNAC (halfway up the stairs) has become until June either an attraction for the mountain and the museum, or a way to distract tourists who want to get closer to our national Metropolitan. The dilemma must have been presented to Pepe Serra and Joan Oliveras, who maintain those plans to expand the museum into the pavilions but who, while the works do not begin, cannot know if the traveling exhibition on the Tim Burton universe distracts or attracts the public to higher levels of the mountain and art.
The fact is that few spaces remain in Barcelona to host exhibitions of this magnitude, even if they are for a mainstream, adolescent, pre-adolescent and post-adolescent audience (understand 40 years and up). An ideal plan to take your children at those ages when they are suffering, and also as a culmination of a day in the mountains after touring the Romanesque and Gothic and modern art that reign far above the regent or consort queens.
Do not try it the other way around: the exhibition on the Tim Burton universe serves more as decompression, as a bag of popcorn, than as an edifying bath of aesthetic sensibility. Better to go down the stairs afterwards than to go up them before. The Labyrinth is exactly what it is: a review of the drawings made by a depressive student, filled with tragicomic nightmares, in a corner of the classroom.
If you want to learn what classic-style immersivity is, forget the small screens or big screens and come see this exhibition.It's not a labyrinth. Don't worry.Despite the title, you will be able to see everything, because you can go forward and backward through the different rooms divided by doors that supposedly open irreversible paths for us.Everything is reversible, because we have paid and, so that it is not aescape roomnot a singlechoose your own adventure,even we can confirm how two supposedly separate doors ---2 and 3, for example---, if we take the trouble to check, sometimes lead to exactly the same room. That is: we will see everything.
And it's worth seeing everything because, if anything stays with you from this exhibition, it's the triumph of three dimensions and the null need to create certain immersive setups. If you want to learn what immersion done in the classic style is, that is, relying only on the talent of drawing and good set designers, good lighting, and above all good sculpture, forget the small screens or big screens and come see this exhibition. The grace is that everything comes from a single talent, from a single stroke, from a single imagination, and this is the merit of little Tim Burton's notebook: that he has transformed the nightmares of adolescence into icons full of expressiveness, humor, aesthetic sense, surrealism, and spectacularity. Yes: with these hands. Yes, it is an artisan's exhibition.
You already know: forests, fogs, ghosts, corpses, zombies, sinister laboratories, bat-men, penguin-men, cats, witches, skeletons… To Tim Burton, apart from his particular universe, products that already existed previously like Batman or Alice in Wonderland or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory have fit him, because they all draw from delirium, from a bad experience, from trauma. We all know that, as the children disappeared during their visit to the factory, we kept wondering if that Roald Dahl story was really made for teenagers.
The same with Alice, and with the queen (regent or consort) who ends up ordering her head to be cut off, or with Batman's cosmic solitude. The sculpted figures are of total perfection, as is the atmosphere of each room, so the texts on the panels are totally superfluous. Evidently, we will read about the artist's obsessions, whether it's Halloween, whether it's the reference to actor Vincent Price, whether it's melancholy, whether it's the dilemma between good and evil and simple trauma (is someone tormented bad?), whether it's love in a cemetery, whether it's monstrous tenderness, whether the panel says les gens in Catalan to refer to people (someone decided that Catalan would be a kind of French), whether it's the charm of madness.
There is a variant of pop-art that should no longer surprise us from Disney and that revels in exaggeration and fable, and in twisting the idea of the monster and insomnia.The best of Burton is Burton, that is, the characters he himself gave birth to, from Edward Scissorhands (a recurring drawing in his high school notebooks) to the brains of Mars Attacksor the very elegant Jack Skellington, fromNightmare Before Christmas, a benchmark of the techniquestop-motionAnd well, and Johnny Depp everywhere.If Johnny Depp didn't exist, Tim Burton would have invented him.
In short, fun and entertainment but also a reminder: there is sophisticated art in the sketches of youth notebooks, there is a variant of pop-art that should no longer surprise us from Disney and that revels in exaggeration and fable, and in twisting the idea of the monster and insomnia. There is tenderness in defect, in flaw, in ugliness and, above all, in loneliness. Tim Burton, apparently, wanted friends. And he decided to create them and, moreover, create them in an adorably terrifying way. If they are imperfect, deep down, they cannot harm me. And perhaps that is why, at the foot of the MNAC, as if he were a child cornered in the playground, Burton's drawings prefer not to climb another step towards Olympus.