In June 2011, the MEAM was finally able to open, under the sponsorship of the “Foundation for the Arts and Artists”, a foundation created in 2005 to promote figurative artists. The MEAM thus became the first and most direct material expression of a journey of work and effort that the Foundation has maintained since its beginnings. The opening of the Museum was not the end of any stage, but was the beginning of a journey that, in a short time, has had an influence on wide sectors of international contemporary art.
The opening of this museum represented a turning point in the level of penetration of figurative art in wide sectors of modern-day society, and has produced a change of perspective by many professionals in art, who began to understand that art in our century already needs new approaches and challenges, highly disassociated from canons and clichés inherited from the previous century.
The early days in the running of a private non-profit Foundation, not supported by any public institution or by any big company or by any powerful sponsor, have not been easy; neither the early days nor those that followed. This is because, just after starting, the deep economic crisis drastically cut the financial possibilities with which the Foundation had counted on to be able to grow. Its founder, José Manuel Infiesta, architect and property developer, saw how in 2008-2009 all his professional projects collapsed in a heavy earthquake that has left architects and constructors on the edge of the abyss. The truth is that, at a given moment, very few people believed in the survival of an institution that had been founded with such signs of weakness and so lacking in institutional or financial support.
However, the Foundation has found an unexpected base of solidity and a wide-ranging support in specific sectors of society: it is the effort of the artists themselves. It is the support of thousands and thousands of authors that, year after year, have rewarded it with their recognition and have made the Foundation the real expression of the struggle of each one of them to achieve recognition from society. The fact is that the Foundation now is, and will be, what the artists want it to be. They are the excuse that justifies its existence. And the more cohesion and unity there is between them, more justification will the Foundation have to carry on publicising to the world a collective work that is resolute in not continuing to be marginalised from the pages of contemporary art history.
The MEAM has become the temple of this new religion, the religion of those that believe, well into the 21st century, in a new expression of what is contemporary in art. Art that no longer conforms with experimentation turned into an end in itself, nor with the permanent essay of forms and colours without achieving any definitive product, nor with the worship of noise for noise’s sake, nor with the manufacture of film montages condemned to boredom. And this new expression once again requires a direct, express, rounded, total, real, intelligible and brilliant art, capable of generating hopes and arousing admiration in wide sectors of the population who, in this way, will make their peace with the art of their time again and dream with hopes that are today completely forgotten.
The fact is that art must be easily assimilated by the spectator; it must be capable of speaking their language, of producing hope in them, of arousing admiration, of opening the box of dreams. Art must be aimed at the man in the street, not at the learned or the specialist. Art must speak the language of the people, not that of the academics.
The intellectual can write interesting essays about the essence of art, but the artist does not live from these essays. The academics can applaud already consecrated artists, but this is not going to guarantee them in any way the ability to survive in their time. The only thing that gives meaning to art is its capacity to connect with the people, of reaching people of its same historical moment in time, of reaching the sensitivity of an average spectator and seducing them. And the fact is that to do that we do not need qualifications and diplomas. It is enough to know how to create.
Abstraction, and all the isms that were formed and progressed like a process of breaking with art throughout the 20th century, have ended up feeding generations of artists that are now sitting in the art schools and contemporary art museums, and who impose their aesthetic canons absolutely intransigently in all the official institutions. Experimentation monopolises all the fairs and the most current demonstrations of art, as if it were its own private reserve. And that initial scent of fresh air, of rupture, of innovation, almost bohemian, that took with it the vanguards of one hundred years ago, has given way to a rancid, gamy stink, repetitive, formal and, in brief, boring. Because, in reality, in the end there is nothing more boring than the reiterated repetition of what they say is innovative when it has already lost the charm of the novelty.
Modern art which, until now, believed it had the right to exclusively appropriate the qualification of being contemporary, no longer says interesting things, and limits itself to maintaining the interests of a market that needs it in order not to collapse. The contemporary art market is a monster that is self-perpetuating, that maintains its sacred monsters in formaldehyde urns and that lives from names that have been made artificially famous but which has now lost all its attraction, and which will only be maintained while it is capable of maintaining the “bluff” in the pages of international criticism.
What the MEAM presents, what the MEAM represents, is simply another way, profoundly original and innovative, of seeing and feeling art in our times. And, after some years of progress, the revolution that in the world of creators has meant this breath of fresh air will gradually reach all the corners, generating a new way of devising the courses of contemporary art.
It is a return to the origins that they have repeatedly hidden from us. It is a recovery of the content of those museums which they promised they were going to destroy. It is the recognition of values that they have rejected, and still reject today, in universities and schools. It is the value of quality as something important, over and above the simple novelty. It is the recovery of tradition, the return to the artful trade, it is the importance of personal work in solitude as a basic source of the creative act, it is the worship of genius (until now discredited), it is the recognition of the works of the grand masters like an arrow that shows the way to follow. It is the return to virtues such as perseverance, constancy, personal creation, tenacity and the worship of the very personality, against the terrible impositions of the market, against the guidelines of dealers and critics involved with the system. It is abandoning demagogy to return to the intimacy of the artist’s studio, it is the return to the cult of personal creation; it is the pleasure, the immense pleasure of making the supreme work of art from the ego itself, through an elaborated, meditated and lengthily pursued profession.
The collection of 21st-CENTURY CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS, which forms one of the most passionate collections of art of our times in our country, is a homage to all those artists who have accompanied us on this long journey, who have worked with us so that an increasingly growing public can enjoy their work, and who continue working with the enthusiasm of creating a work that will outlast them, that surpasses our small and brief lives, and which finally is admired and recognised by the majority of our contemporaries.
The MEAM cannot hide its pride on being the first institution, with a real physical, stable and permanent headquarters, that dares to present a grand collection of works by active artists that the public appreciates and applauds. Nevertheless, at the MEAM we also feel frustration for not having the sufficient means to include in this sample the work of so many other artists, equally exquisite, that have not been able to be included between the walls of our museum. We hope that we will gradually put right this situation, ensuring that we reach more and more artists and in more countries, in this current, which is now unstoppable, and which is changing the very foundations of contemporary art.
We hope the visitor who enters to discover this space full of sensitivity, learns to stroll around its rooms, savouring the many and exquisite corners that it houses, savouring the sensation of pleasure that painting, sculpture and music want to give them, to leave in them an indelible memory. Every one of the works shown on our walls is placed to accompany them in their stay with us and, afterwards, when they return to the outside world, to leave in their soul a beautiful, intimate and comforting memory, the feeling that another world is also possible.
