LA OCAÑA: BARCELONA
José Pérez Ocaña (Cantillana, 1947 - Seville, 1983) was one of the main figures of the Barcelona counterculture movement in the 1970s. Indeed, his great popularity continues to conceal his work as an artist, an original practice which announced —30 years in advance— an exemplary model of creating art for the 21st century. This exhibition, curated by Pedro G. Romero, brings together around 40 drawings, paintings and papier-mâché sculptures which show Ocaña’s capacity for transformation and transformism, his performativity.
“La Ocaña appears to be simple, straightforward and popular when, in actual fact, he is planning ways and modes of doing which accumulate knowledge, dissident practices and wide-ranging survivals”, as Pedro G. Romero clearly explains in the exhibition’s curatorial statement. Indeed, José Pérez Ocaña’s drawings, paintings and sculptures always refer to an action, to a specific event, and we have assembled the works according to these experiences.
First, the old, wise and sinister had a privileged figuration in Ocaña’s world. For him, the presence of death was natural and mundane. See, especially, La plañidera (1977).
Second, the political. On the night of 24 July 1978, the Barcelona municipal police arrested Ocaña, Nazario and a friend. The subsequent imprisonment was recreated by the artist in numerous drawings with the aim of giving public significance to what had happened and converting it into a scandal with political repercussions. Apart from the watercolours in the “La detención” series, which can be seen in this exhibition, it is important to mention the portraits of beggars. Painting became an excuse to show his way of living and carnival was a time when he could put into practice his way of understanding life, that is inverting bourgeois values for a few days and providing it with a revolutionary character.
Third, Ocaña used his symbolic representations of the body to provoke, and at the same time to naturalize, making them visible in the public space, a set of popular and collective performative practices of gender and sexual disobedience. The works Sin título (Ángeles de la guarda) (1980) and Inmaculada de las pollas (1976) are examples of this.
Furthermore, in 1979 Ocaña participated in the filming of Manderley. In this film by Jesús Garay, which recalls the mythical setting used by Alfred Hitchcock for Rebecca (1940), fiction and reality are blurred and Ocaña is the painter in the leading role. We are displaying, for the first time, the original screenplay of the film used by Jesús Pérez Ocaña with the artist’s notes and drawings, together with some watercolours also painted by him during the filming.
In “La Ocaña”, you can also see the Asunción gloriosa (1981-82), a group of 14 papier-mâché figures that evokes the feast of the ascension with the Coronation of the Virgin of Cantillana. This installation is an expanded version of the one presented in the MACBA in 2015, in the framework of the exhibition “The Beast and the Sovereign”, and in the 2014 Bienal de São Paulo, among others. In this same space there is a series of watercolours belonging to the “Manolas” series (1981-82), portraits of Ocaña’s friends dressed as Manola, here as observers. Likewise, the screening of the short film by Jesús Garay Expocaña 82 accompanied the Asunción gloriosa, as the artist wanted, in the exhibition “The Spring”, held in 1982 in the Chapel of the Former Hospital of Barcelona.
