James Lee Byars had scheduled an exhibition at the Luis Adelantado gallery following his individual exhibition at IVAM Carmen Centre in 1994. Nevertheless, it was not to be, since Byars soon learned that he had a disease that would prevent this event from taking place. That exhibition would be one of those plans that would just have to wait, suspended in the memory of time, trapped in nostalgia, something that could have been but was not. When he found out that his cancer was incurable, Byars sent a postcard to the gallery bearing just a single sentence: “Please Luis, teach me how to die”. That plea shows the feeling there was between the artist and the gallery owner, but it also talks about another type of teaching, one to do with life, because living always has something to learn from dying, as biographers well know. And that learning of life is something that can be traced, recognised and found in the early years of history of the Luis Adelantado gallery. Somehow, that history is the history of learning, learning by Luis Adelantado himself and his daughter Olga, who now runs the project in Valencia.

This exhibition has a rather melancholic note to it, of something that was and also something that could have been. It is an exhibition of possible exhibitions, one consisting of four, designed around work that the gallery kept back during its early years as its history was unfolding, but it also teaches us to see those who come to visit the gallery. In the early years, there was a clear interest in painting, and its multiple developments, as can be seen in the work by Ferran García Sevilla, Xavier Grau, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, José Noguero and Juan Uslé. But there was also in interest in artists who worked with materials and its many meanings, such as Carmen Calvo, Eva Lootz, Miquel Navarro, Adolfo Schlosser and Gilberto Zorio, or those who put emphasis on space through their sculptures, such as Pedro Cabrita Reis, José Pedro Croft and Susana Solano. Artists who questioned reality from a politically open standpoint were gradually included, and who not only represented the new generation, but also Latin American art, as seen in the photographs by Alexander Apóstol and Milagros de la Torre. This exhibition is not only a sample of artwork produced in the 90’s and early 2000’s, but also features a significant part of the art critique of the time. The exhibition halls also echo the voices of some of the authors whose texts accompanied the exhibitions in the catalogues the gallery published. They are ghostly words of nostalgia, that are here and there, in the past and in the present. They interpreted the work that was exhibited and today take on a new sense, as do the exhibits they refer to.—Sergio Rubira

Enséñame a vivir. (35 años de la Galería Luis Adelantado)

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