Equipo Crónica

CRONICA TEAM (Valencia, 1964 - 1981).
Untitled.
Lithograph, copy 18/50.
Signed and justified by hand.
Size: 86 x 60 cm; 109 x 81 cm (frame).
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, and he explains the theoretical basis of Equipo in a text entitled "La distanciación de la Distanciación" ("The Distancing of Distanciation"). The three painters also signed a manifesto in 1965, in which they defined themselves as a working group with collective methods and supra-individual aims. Equipo Crónica moved away from the prevailing informalism to cultivate figurative painting, closely linked to pop art. Fed up with introspection, these artists took to the streets and observed the world around them, a society of incipient industrialisation and tourists. Their style was a unique blend of realism, criticism, pop, pictorial quotations, anachronisms and bittersweet pastiches. The group produced paintings, sculptures and prints, and tended to work in series, which allowed the same subject to be analysed in different variations. Equipo Crónica started 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 Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, the MACBA in Barcelona, the Fundación Juan March and the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, among others. In 2007 an exhibition dedicated to Equipo Crónica was organised at the Museo de Arte Abstracto in Cuenca.