Art Ben Lliure. 40 years of IES Benlliure

Art Ben Lliure

40 years of IES Benlliure


Thesaurus room - La Nau

From 12th March to April 26th 2009

From Tuesday to Saturday, from 10 to 13.30 and from 16 to 20 h.

Sunday, from 10 to 14 h.

Organised by: IES Benlliure and UV Department for Culture

Produced by: Universitat de València

Curator: Pilar Moreno, IES Benlliure

Participating artists:  

JOSEP VICENT ALVARO PUIG, ROBERTO AMADOR MOSCARDÓ, FELIP BALDÓ, PAU  BELTRÁN ALÓS, MONTSE BENEYTO GARCÍA, ROSA BOSCH ESPERT, MIGUEL CALATAYUD, FRANCISCO CALATAYUD CASES, Mª JOSÉ CARRIÓN MONDÉJAR, SERGIO CASES GORBE, INMA COLL ALEIXANDRE, DOLORES COMPANY GÓMEZ, LUCÍA CONEJERO RODILLA, DANIEL DIEZ RODRÍGUEZ, RAÚL DIEZ RODRÍGUEZ, SONIA DIEZ RODRÍGUEZ, VICTORIA ESGUEVA LÓPEZ, RAFAEL FERNÁNDEZ MARTÍNEZ, MIQUEL FRANCES I DOMENECH, LINO GARCÍA CODONYER, ANDRÉS-L. GARCÍA MARCO, GRUPO KAPA (VICENTE ATIENZA, CARLOS GÓMEZ, MANOLO BADAL, MIGUEL ÁNGEL PÉREZ, PEPA PRETEL, LUCÍA RUIZ SEGURA), EVA MARÍN JORDÁ, ROSARIO  Mª  MARSILLA HERNÁNDEZ, RAFAEL MARTÍ QUINTO, ANNA MARTÍ I RIBES, L0LA MÁS HERNÁNDEZ, ALICIA MATÍES ARIÑO, CONSUELO MENCHETA BENET, EVA MÓNER ROMERO, SIGFRID MONLEÓN, MAGDA MORATA CUBELLS, PILAR MORENO, JESÚS MANUEL MORENO MONTERO, EVA  MUS GRANDE, MARIA NAVARRO CAMPOS, JOSE Mª PELLICER MATEO, LUIS PÉREZ IGUALADA, ELSA PÉREZ ROBLES, MIQUEL PÉREZ ROBLES, SARA PÉREZ-BERMÚDEZ, VICENT RICÓS, ANA SANZ LLORENS, FRANCISCO SEBASTIÁN NICOLAU, MERCEDES SEBASTIÁN NICOLAU, LAURA SILVESTRE GARCÍA, MIGUEL SILVESTRE MOROS, ROSA TORRES MOLINA, MªJOSÉ ZARAGOZA GARCÍA

The exhibition Art Ben Lliure is an initiative by Benlliure High School of Valencia to celebrate its 40^th birthday.  The school has been very influential and is deeply rooted in Valencian society.

Over the past 40 years, everything seems to have changed except for its name. It was named Benlliure after the Valencian sculptor Mariano Benlliure y Gil (1862-1947).

Valencia's Benlliure High School was founded following a 1962 order as an Instituto Nacional de Enseñanza Media for boys. It then offered co-education in October 1968, a year of great symbolism and significance in Europe's social and cultural history.

The 1953 Act on Secondary Education Regulation was still in force at the time, which established six years of elementary and secondary education, the final examination calls, and the Pre-university Course. Two years later, in 1970, the new Education General Act was enforced. And much later, in 2000, the modern Benlliure School was reopened in the same site taking into account the needs of a more recent law, the LOGSE Act.

The exhibition Art Ben Lliure describes those forty giddy and decisive years we were lucky to live, and includes works by almost fifty artists who were once students or teachers at the Alboraya Street school. Fifty former students and teachers, artists from all backgrounds and styles, from sculpture to photomontage, from abstraction to realism, with works near Constructivism, new figuration or Trans Avant-Garde, Pop Art or Minimalism have come together to pay homage to their own alma mater –Benlliure School- creating a mosaic of images for our eyes to see what we are like and, once again, art’s endless wealth and variety.

Always sensitive to art expression and dissemination and to the social, cultural and educational history of our people, Universitat de València is most proud to become, one more time, a meeting point presenting at La Nau art conceived at Instituto Benlliure. As mentioned earlier, the exhibition brings together teachers and students, people of all ages, consolidated and not so known artists from different plastic and non-plastic art fields.

One can imagine that in 40 years’ time another anniversary will be celebrated at La Nau, the 80^th birthday of Instituto Benlliure! The same way we come to see ourselves in these works of art, Valencians in the future might also get close to the work of new students and teachers to try to understand themselves.

EDUCATION, ART AND LIFE 

Art education is much more than lessons, exams, instruction, information, knowing techniques, painters, and art currents or movements. And much more than market, trade fairs, auctions, art dealers, galleries, museums, fame or money. Art education is education for life, pleasure, work, play, love and friendship; it equips students with joy, freedom, plurality, responsibility and with the practice of looking at the world, people and things with a different gaze. A liberated, critical and iteractive gaze that beats all clichés, one that opens up different, always renewed avenues, one in which myth and science, nature and culture, past history and future come to terms, making the most of the present's richness. 

All aesthetics is ethics. And vive versa. Therefore, art education is not synonymous with teaching hackneyed concepts about beauty, decorationism, or shallow accessories, but a fascinating, full-of-passion search and adventure in the construction of artistic life. Unlike the old and remote beatus ille -taking refuge in a world of protective forms- this life looks for a synthesis between ethics and aesthetics in order to transform everyday sounds, routines and risks into an intimate appeal, a true transubstantiation: the creation of a new substance from another one in an infinite, always renewed process, even beyond death: artistic life is the triumph of open-minded, dynamic and hard-working humankind under permanent metamorphosis. Like a butterfly. Like a multi-colour butterfly unfolding its wings to fly.

This exhibition is an example. Because it is more than an exhibition: its purpose is not to show the professional work of artists more or less valued in the market but to pool efforts and the dialogues between Benlliure teachers and students. Benlliure’s 40 year-old educational adventure drives us and appeals to us: the exhibition includes 52 pieces by 52 education artists. The exhibits knock down the barriers of academic authoritarianism to bring the teaching authority game closer to us in a fine balance between the works of the students and those of the teachers. Inter-generational walls –sometimes contrived and embarrassing- are demolished in this way. The 52 pieces are expressed in different formats and supports and with different techniques, from paintings to documentaries, or from photography to sculpture. All of them are very rich and plural: from the re-interpretation of some elements of mass media to popular culture or a new look at Surrealism, Classicism or Abstraction. And all of them reveal the compromise between art and education and learning as a way to live a full artistic life: our own transubstantiation, through work and effort, into free butterflies. Butterflies that shutter the shell of egotism under the light of a love which –from the classroom- goes beyond all shadows and colours. 

Manuel Molins. Playwright and Teacher. IES. Benlliure 1985 – 2008.