Equipo Crónica

Equipo Crónica (Valencia, 1964 - 1981).
Untitled.
Ink on paper.
Invitation to the exhibition "La partida de billar" at Sala Luzan (Zaragoza), 1978.
Signed by Manolo Valdés (Valencia, 1942) and Rafael Solbes (Valencia, 1940 - 1981).
Measurements: 23,5 x 39 cm.
Invitation to the exhibition "La partida de billar" in the Luzan room of the Caja de Ahorros de la Immaculada (Zaragoza) in 1978. The invitation is intervened by the artists Manolo Valdés and Rafael Solbes.
Equipo Crónica, or Crónicas de la Realidad, was a group of Spanish painters active between 1964 and 1981. It was founded by Manolo Valdés, Juan Antonio Toledo, who soon left the group, and Rafael Solbes, whose death in 1981 put an end to the project. The historian and critic Tomás Llorens was also a member of the group. He explains the theoretical bases of the Equipo in a text entitled "La distanciación de la Distanciación" (The Distancing of Distanciation). Likewise, the three painters signed a manifesto in 1965, where they defined themselves as a working group with collective methods and supra-individual goals. Equipo Crónica moved away from the prevailing informalism to cultivate a figurative painting, closely linked to pop-art. Fed up with introspection, these artists went out into the street and observed the world around them, a society of incipient industrialization and tourists. Their style involved a unique blend of realism, criticism, pop, pictorial quotations, anachronisms and bittersweet pastiches. The group produced paintings, sculptures and engravings, and used to work in series, which allowed them to analyze the same subject with different variations. Equipo Crónica starts from a very simple language, with monochrome and repeated images, very close to contemporary media, especially newspaper photographs. There are works by Equipo Crónica in the IVAM in Valencia, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the MACBA in Barcelona, the Juan March Foundation and the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid, among others. In 2007 an exhibition dedicated to Equipo Crónica was organized at the Museo de Arte Abstracto in Cuenca.