The La Nau Cultural Centre presents an exhibition about disease, life and art through personal experience by Xisco Mensua

## The La Nau Cultural Centre presents an exhibition about disease, life and art through personal experience by Xisco Mensua

'Le diable probablement', 2024. Oil and aquarelle on paper, 73 x 105 cm.

The Universitat de València will inaugurate today Tuesday, 22 October, at 7pm, at the La Nau Cultural Centre, the exhibition ‘Nadie puede saber cómo es la noche’, by the artist Xisco Mensua (Barcelona, 1960). The exhibition that can be visited at the la Sala Oberta until 7 January 2025, is curated by the Professor Emeritus from the UV, Nicolás Sánchez Durá.

The artist reflects about terminal disease and the trace of death, from personal experience and the vital moment she is going through. “The sample is not only a reflection about disease and the sense or no sense of life, but also a game with emotions that the artists experiments when capturing her life lesson.”, explains the curator. Even that, Sánchez Durá points out, the work by Xisco Mensua, an artist whose life has been marked by disease ever since he was a child, “he has never breathed sorrow, but the opposite: he has always reflected happiness, an ironic humour of sceptic humour”.

The exhibition, that lets us into the intimacy of the artist’s creations when his life is running out, includes multiple philosophical or literary references meticulously selected, like the one by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The human being lives their daily-life with the brightness of a light of which they do not realise until it switches off...” reads the text on the wall at the entry to the exhibition, “Today is always still,” de Antonio Machado, or a poem by Ángel González about the sense of poetic determination even at the certainty of a coming night. The citations, chosen together with his friend and curator, and the artist, have been useful all along his career to activate his creations and define his personal and artistic universe. “I’ve been collecting many of these phrases and verses throughout my life, and they describe my self and my work”. Some of these citations are tangled between drawings by Mensua, like happens with a poem by Friederich Hölderlin, in which the poem is asking for one more day to house what is prized the most: the poem, the phrase by the conceptual artist On kawara: ‘I am still alive’, or the verse by Alejandra Pizarnik, who reclaims the value of words over the catching.

Most of the works exhibited have been realized *ex profeso* for the exhibition. The topics reflected have been the protagonists of his trajectory: childhood (there is a self portrait about the sick child), desire, memory, life uncertainty, the irreversible pass of time... The drawings hug the words, the pictures make sense in polyptych paintings that build meanings at the same time as they break into pieces...

As for the aesthetic style, Mensua has used different plastic techniques like, oil on paper, oil on canvas, ink on paper and digital printing. The last has been used to reproduce parts from the journal notebooks that he illustrated during one of his last hospitalizations. And as always in his works, the main character, is colour black, and Mensua mentions Ad Reinhardt, one of his artistic referents and flag bearer of this colour.

The title of the exhibition, ‘No one can know what the night is like”, has been chosen by the artist and is one of the phrases that appears in one of the works by the English dramaturg, Sarah Kane. It is not the first time that Xisco Mensua exhibits at La Nau. Their relationship goes back to 30 years ago. In 1990, ten years before the refurbishment of the historic building from the Universitat de València to be announced a cultural centre, he already coincided with Sánchez Durá, as curator, at the collective exhibition. In 2015 he participated (and won) the II Premi d’Adquisió Fundació Cañada Blanch for an exhibition presented at the Sala Academia. And in 2017, he presented ‘No return’ at the Sala Martínez Guerribeitia. With this sample, the circle closes. The exhibition is accompanied by a careful catalogue that includes texts by Wittgenstein, Ángel González and Nicolás Sánchez Durá.

Xisco Mensua (Barcelona, 1960) uses time as a space to develop a series of concepts and complex themes in between. Poetry, philosophy, social media, education or childhood are recurrent references in his series of drawings, most of the time polyptychs, paintings, and collages. Among numerous collective exhibitions there is: *Sense Coartada* (Bellesa i Obscenitat), Sala d’Exposicions de la Universitat (Valencia, 1990); *Al Oeste*, Club Diario Levante (Valencia, 1991); *The Return of the Cadavre Exquis*, The Drawing Center (New York, 1993); *Arte joven en los fondos del Museo Reina Sofía*, Centro Wifredo Lam (La Habana, 1995) among others. His work can be found in colections like the ones from the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), Fundación La Caixa (Barcelona), IVAM (Valencia), MUSAC (León), CAC (Málaga), Fundación Coca-Cola (Madrid) and the Universitat de València.

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