Installation view, Álvaro Urbano: GRANADA GRANADA, Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City, 2023. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
GRANADA GRANADA is an exhibition in two chapters. The first at Travesía Cuatro’s space in Guadalajara, and the second in Mexico City. In both, Álvaro Urbano (Madrid, 1983) imagines an encounter between the architect Luis Barragán and the poet Federico García Lorca. As a sort of guide, Álvaro dreams of the mute witnesses of the encounter, the plants, the floors and the architecture as an empty memory of those who left. The starting point for this story is Casa Franco, designed in 1929 by the tapatío architect. The Moorish influence can be perceived in the patios, doors and woodwork, as well as in the use of light and the presence of water in the small garden, elements that fascinated Barragán on his trip to Andalusia.
Installation view, Álvaro Urbano: GRANADA GRANADA, Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City, 2023. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
Installation view, Álvaro Urbano: GRANADA GRANADA, Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City, 2023. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
Installation view, Álvaro Urbano: GRANADA GRANADA, Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City, 2023. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
Installation view, Álvaro Urbano: GRANADA GRANADA, Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City, 2023. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
Installation view, Álvaro Urbano: GRANADA GRANADA, Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City, 2023. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
Barragán’s infatuation with the city of Granada and his confessed admiration for García Lorca are embodied in a pomegranate blossom that Urbano finds in the Casa Jardín Ortega in Mexico City.
During the summer of 2022, Álvaro Urbano visits the Huerta de San Vicente, the house where the García Lorca family spent their summers in Granada, and where Federico wrote Yerma, Bodas de sangre and Romancero gitano. The poet refers to the balcony of his bedchamber in the Huerta as the place where the city appeared before him in all its splendor “… in front of my balcony, stretched out in the distance with a beauty never equaled”.
Entering Federico’s domestic intimacy, Álvaro perceives the tension between memory and myth. Today, in the Casa Franco in Guadalajara, the floors, the balcony and the memories of García Lorca’s empty house, behind whose window is raining. It is the memory of Urbano that makes the encounter possible: Federico and Luis in Granada in the summer of 1924. It is in Mexico City, where the link between Lorca and Barragán takes the form of a garden, plants that Álvaro finds in the poet’s poems and in the architect’s gardens, and which seek to reach each other. While the sun sets on the balcony in Guadalajara, the dawn breaks on the balcony in Mexico City. Thus these chapters contain –like the gardens of the Alhambra– an entire universe, a sleepless night.
Installation view, Álvaro Urbano: GRANADA GRANADA, Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City, 2023. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
Installation view, Álvaro Urbano: GRANADA GRANADA, Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City, 2023. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
Installation view, Álvaro Urbano: GRANADA GRANADA, Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City, 2023. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
Installation view, Álvaro Urbano: GRANADA GRANADA, Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City, 2023. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
Installation view, Álvaro Urbano: GRANADA GRANADA, Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City, 2023. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
Installation view, Álvaro Urbano: GRANADA GRANADA, Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City, 2023. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
Installation view, Álvaro Urbano: GRANADA GRANADA, Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City, 2023. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
Installation view, Álvaro Urbano: GRANADA GRANADA, Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City, 2023. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.