Equipo Realidad (Jorge Ballester)

EQUIPO REALIDAD, Jorge Ballester (Valencia, 1941 - 2014).
"Happy holidays".
Mixed media on paper.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 20 x 22,5 cm.

Jorge Ballester founded Equipo Realidad with Joan Cardells in 1966, in the context of Franco's developmentalism, and they will dissolve it amicably ten years later, due to the change of scenery that the democratic transition entailed. The artistic duo was part of the Valencian movement Crónica de la Realidad, of pop aesthetics, figurative and with a deep critical charge, developed around the theories of Vicente Aguilera Cerni. Equipo Realidad's trajectory was determined by its commitment to the social, political, economic and cultural situation of Spain in the sixties and seventies, as well as by the application of Marxist ideas on issues such as consumerism, political oppression, mass media, the social role of women or the function of art. Likewise, his was an anti-mercantilist version of criticism, which did not seek to please but to provoke, following his maxim "what interests us is not reality but its image".
Ballester and Cardells met at the School of Fine Arts in Valencia in 1964, and it was precisely at the university where they met the artists of Estampa Popular, as well as the precursors of Equipo Crónica. Although Equipo Realidad was founded in 1965, it was not until 1966 that they began their artistic career, with the painting "El entierro del estudiante Orgaz" (The Burial of the Student Orgaz). In these early years the duo combined painting with the creation of posters and magazine covers. Some time later they made two visits to Paris where they discovered new tendencies, as well as spending a year working in Milan. They finally returned to work in 1972 after signing a contract with the Punto gallery in Valencia, which provided them with the necessary economic stability to focus on their pictorial production. Thus began a new stage in the production of Equipo Realidad, characterized by a greater informative potential of the images and a flight from indiscriminate satire. His work will now be more subtle, and the acrylics and flat colors of the first stage will disappear in favor of oil and degraded colors. In 1976 Cardells left the group and, although Ballester continued to work under the same name with the photographer Enrique Carrazoni, Equipo Realidad finally disbanded in 1977. In this period of ten years, the duo held more than a hundred exhibitions, including solo and group exhibitions. Works by Equipo Realidad are currently held in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and the IVAM in Valencia, among other collections.