The Brooklyn Rail

Should there ever be the need for an artist who can envision the apocalypse, Mat Collishaw would probably be the right man to call. This thought came up after I saw some of his work in Valencia, in the newly opened Centro de Arte Hortensia Herrero (CAHH), a private collection gone public, with an impressive list of artists, both Spanish and international. Collishaw is one of a handful who were invited to develop a site-specific work that would find a home in the renovated seventeenth-century Palazzo Valeriola in the center of town. In his work, there is often a sense of danger, be it violence, cruelty, or simply decay. But he presents his work in such a monumental and ingenious way that you cannot help looking. Like staring into a fire.

The CAHH was founded by Hortensia Herrero, a collector who, with her husband, Juan Roig, largely owns one of Spain’s supermarket chains. The headquarters of the company are close to Valencia, which is the reason the city is the focus of the cultural and entrepreneurial endeavors of the family. Not tax money, but grocery money coming back to the people.

Of the invited artists, Collishaw is probably the one who engaged most with the city, its tradition, and its history. For his Transformer (2023), he was inspired by the Fallas, Valencia’s yearly spring festivities accompanied by grand fireworks as well as the burnings of giant wooden ninots. These figures or characters are artfully built and carried in processions, after which they are burned. The fire stands for renewal, getting rid of (hated) figures; it is a centuries-old rite of spring. While in other cities, people might panic when they hear explosions, in Valencia nobody would believe it is war or an attack. It is just fireworks.

Collishaw had been planning to film on location in Valencia in 2020, but then the pandemic came and the festivities were canceled. As an artist who seems to be stimulated rather than discouraged by the impossible, he took the detour (or was it a shortcut?) of digital creation. To integrate his vision of the Fallas into a tale of transformation, he used Unreal Engine, software that is used to make video games. A lot can be created in this program, and the result is more malleable than real footage, says Collishaw. You can make flowers which transform in flames, which develop into butterflies, and so on. And if you do not like the angle after all, you can still move the “camera”. To engage the viewer physically in a feeling of movement seems key to the work of Collishaw, who installed Transformer in a corridor between two wings of the Valencian palace, showing projections on both sides. The heat is close and palpable; passing through, you are in the midst of two explosive, regenerative moving tableaus.

With the same software, you can also create incredibly realistic-looking horses and make them run a race, which happens in Collishaw’s second contribution to the collection. Left in Dust (2023) is a projection on an oval-shaped transparent screen, echoing the shape of a Roman circus that existed in ancient times on the very spot where the palace now stands.

***

The doorman is called Diego, after the painter, he explained, as his father liked the old masters. Diego takes care of the residential complex where I spend my first nights in Valencia. Its dated modernity spreads a sense of order, the feeling that architecture can make things right with some color accents, reduced lines, and a shielding off of the hustle and bustle of the city. In the courtyard, there is a basin not deep enough for a pool but offering refreshment as an idea and a surface for reflection.

From my modernist residence, it is a twenty-minute walk to the historic center with its baroque churches, the palace where CAHH is located, and most other art spots as well. Valencia is pleasant and manageable in size; there is sun, city, beach, and culture. In terms of art, there are just a few international galleries and some institutions that show modern and contemporary art, like IVAM, Bombas Gens, and now the CAHH, too.

With grocery money, you can buy a lot of blue-chip artworks that many museums (and individuals) cannot afford. But money alone does not make a good collection or presentation. Discussing the new center with people who work for other Valencian institutions, I encounter a rather cool enthusiasm, if not skepticism. The collection is very masculine, a curator said, and not exactly in tune with current perspectives in museums, where the focus lies on filling the gaps in art history. A gallery owner objects that political or sexual content will not be shown in CAHH; he does not feel represented by the art on view. Are these territorial remarks of art players who fear competition or envy the budget? Or is it true that CAHH cannot fully grasp the spirit of our time?

It depends on how you define “spirit.” Considering the modest offer of art in the city, you could welcome an initiative that allows the Valencians to see works by artists such as Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, Anselm Kiefer, David Hockney, and many others. There are also quite a few Spanish positions mixed into the international collection, with works by artists such as Antoni Tàpies, Manolo Valdés, or Blanca Muñoz, which is a way of creating context from the Spanish perspective. One does notice, however, that the rooms with yearly acquisitions from Valencian galleries is not the forte of the collection. It does not look like CAHH is eager to find contemporary art in the region. Rather, it collects through art-fair shopping and continental travels to established artists’ studios.

“She buys what she likes,” Javier Molins says, when I ask if certain types of art are excluded, or what the focus of the CAHH exactly is. As the artistic advisor, he has the position to propose works, develop a direction, but in the end, it is Hortensia Herrero who decides. It is her palace, and, unlike museums, she does not have the obligation to represent anything other than her taste. Herrero likes famous male artists, you have to conclude, and in some (not all) cases, that works out quite well, as in one of the most impressive rooms of the palace, where three works by Kiefer meet two by Baselitz. The art here has both physical and existential weight; the flowers of evil in Kiefer’s work had to be extracted from deep grounds. Even though on other occasions I have been turned off by Kiefer’s pathos, here it is balanced and works beautifully in the space.

In another room, Sean Scully “intervened” in an old chapel, creating a light space for reflection, eschewing the masculinity that his presence as a person might evoke. What he has created escapes such identification, in fact. Something was transcended here, and that makes it a special and hospitable space for the visitor. For one window, Scully took an example from patterns in his geometric work from the 1970s. Three other windows are related to his more recent “Landline” series, of which one painting is integrated in the chapel, with red paint dripping down, easily suggesting a sacrificial moment. In the realm of abstraction, though, no flesh or figure is depicted.

In times of distress and agitation, it is good to find a place like the one Scully created, a space of calmness that allows viewers to turn inwards, to just look and be. That is one modus of what art can be and what the palace offers: a spiritual refuge, unassigned to any religion. There is a curving bench to sit on, inviting you to leave your thoughts behind and take in the colored light.

Abstraction seems key in this first presentation of Herrero’s collection. With some exceptions, most works refrain from storytelling or figuration, speaking instead through surface, material, texture, light, and presence as an object. This goes as much for the colored kinetic works of Carlos Cruz-Diez as for the rough surfaces of Antoni Tàpies. While the rooms of Collishaw, Kiefer, and Scully stand out because the art pervades the whole space, in some other rooms, the feeling is more of a survey or a compilation of works, like in a book of art history. For instance, in a space with only sculptures (Anish Kapoor, Julian Opie, Elmgreen & Dragset, Blanca Muñoz) the works do not get the right space to evoke their specific meanings, mainly saying: I am a sculpture. A similar thing happens in a room with photographs (Thomas Ruff, Idris Khan, Andreas Gursky) that are not necessarily related to each other, other than sharing the medium.

An isolated, less favorable spot has been assigned to Juan Uslé, who lives between New York and Saro but has a connection to Valencia because he studied art there in the 1970s. His only painting in the collection, a work from the series “Soné que revelabas” (2015), would have benefited from spacious, chapel-like attention, but instead ended up in a corridor opposite the elevator, not allowing the meditative attention from which it was born.

Nowadays, the term “immersive art” is used frequently by curators, usually in relation to moving images or interactive installations, even though the principle of immersion has obviously been an aspect of art throughout the centuries. Think of Giotto’s chapel in Padua or Matisse’s chapel in Saint Paul de Vence. In the contributions of Olafur Eliasson and Cristina Iglesias, both built as passageways, the immersion is a condition for the works to function. The visitor has to step through the work, and the distinction between an object to look at and the one looking dissolves. In Iglesias’s case, there are curving, stone-like walls with imprints of organic motifs. In between the motifs are mirrors, which make the viewer aware of being there. They act like interruptions, or, you could say, propose the “self” as an extension of nature. Eliasson, on the other hand, creates more of an optical experience, colors changing as viewers pass through a tunnel of light.

It is significant that the works which developed out of a close engagement between the artists and the space are the ones that come to life most fully and convincingly. Elsewhere in Valencia, another work of Cristina Iglesias has found a place in Bombas Gens, an art center with a beautifully conceived garden where plants and flowers from all over the world are collected. This environment matches well with Iglesias’s sculpture in the ground: a stream of water running through a bed of bronze with floral motifs. It is a work inspired by the landscape around the Túria river that flooded the city of Valencia in 1957, after which its course was changed. For Iglesias, responding to the environment is at the heart of her practice, which often happens in public spaces.

Speaking about private and public: who really owns an artwork? On a physical and legal level, a collector like Herrero undoubtedly does, and there are not many people with budgets like hers. Yet, on another level, works of art remain connected to the artists who made them, and when exhibited in a public space, they can become—intellectually, spiritually, or otherwise—part of the visitor’s experience. No one can really own the light in Scully’s chapel, or the ambivalent attraction caused by moving through Collishaw’s work. Or, you could say, everybody can own it, if the viewer's mind meets with the circumstances of the work. In that sense, Herrero shares the works with any audience who wants to come and look at them.

It is easy to criticize a collector for what she did not buy. Of course, there are many options you could think of: more female, more contemporary, better local artists, more diverse. But Herrero (with Molins) has her own ways, and her choices include different proposals of what art can be, and to what senses it appeals. I imagine that most visitors will find at least some works in the collection where, for a moment, they feel like co-owners, rich and blessed.

In way of critique, I would address the presentation rather than the collection. Or: the question which ways of displaying are favorable for the works. In the current set-up, different logics of showing are followed. Some rooms are assembled through an art historical perspective, others offer an intuitive dialogue between works or a medium-based argument pulling them together. Then there are the site-specific works, where artists have a secluded space. Through the latter, the center has created a high standard for itself and for all the works on display because it gives examples of how art can be when it spreads its wings.

What can be seen is a start, the first collection presentation in CAHH’s own home. The same works, in other combinations, or mixed with other parts of the collection, might produce different trajectories. Still to be developed narratives can be highlighted in future exhibitions or programs. For Valencia, its inhabitants, and its visitors, including the critics among them, this is good news. There is a lot to see, to develop, and to discuss.