Page 23 - Nada temas, dice ella

The compelling desire to understand our history cannot simply entail a return to the rich treasures of its ancient archaeological past. We wouldn’t travel back
to remote centuries if we didn’t sense that on our journey we would discover affinities and connections with our own sensitivity and with the concerns of our day and age. Such is the complex, circular nature of understanding.
Therefore the celebration of a historical figure is much more effective and appealing the closer it brings us to her. This year we are commemorating the five-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Saint Teresa of Avila (1515), whose biography, personality and oeuvre offer us a bridge along which we may move, in both directions, between the contemporaneity of yesterday and the histo- ricity of the present.
Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), a national society under the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, brings the official celebration of the anniversary to a close by organising, in collaboration with Valladolid’s Museo Nacional de Escultura, an impressive exhibition curated by Rosa Martínez entitled Fear Nothing, She Says. When Art Reveals Mystic Truths.
The exhibition endeavours to show how artistic creation today continues to be based on spirituality, mystic ventures, religiousness and the sacred, as it was in that harsh age five hundred years ago, yet it also explores the sort of worldly issues that altered the fate of Teresa of Avila, such as power relations, her femin- inity, her literary vocation, the eventful journeys of her life, the heterodoxy of her Jewish origins and the determination of her reformist venture. Far from having overlooked the concerns that prevailed in traditional societies, the art of recent decades has focused on the spirituality and the metaphysical world of the beyond, as proved by this handful of important contemporary names, Span- ish and foreign, male and female, all of great international renown.
For the Museo Nacional de Escultura, this show is doubly attractive. Firstly, because of its content: the core of its historical collection consists of a splendid gallery of images of divine contemplation, of saintliness and of the spirituality of the Counter-Reformation as represented in the Golden Age by the artists contemporary to Teresa of Avila. In the context of this rich heritage, the works of today – the heritage of tomorrow – offer a counterpoint, an opening towards other ways of understanding this mysterious theatre of the soul and the present aspiration of art to reveal mystic truths. Secondly, because it concerns sculp- ture as an artistic category, enabling reflection on the trend it has followed over the past fifty years, abandoning its millenary equilibrium and giving up both the traditional treatment of the human figure and the tangible object in order to extend its physical and conceptual borders, merge with architecture,