Between Abyss and Entanglement

The Fundación Antonio Pérez in the Old Town of Cuenca

During our first walk through the old town of Cuenca, something happened that cannot be planned.
A brightly lit door stood open in the former Convento de las Carmelitas Descalzas. We stepped inside out of curiosity—and suddenly found ourselves in one of the most impressive art collections in Spain: the Fundación Antonio Pérez.

What appears modest from the outside unfolds inside with remarkable intensity. The former convent spaces house a collection that is neither smooth nor didactic. Instead, a dialogue emerges between architecture, artworks, and viewer—intense, sometimes unsettling, and deeply memorable.

Rossella Vasta: Entanglements – Black Interweavings

(Spring 2023)

In spring 2023, we were immediately drawn to the temporary exhibition Entanglements by Rossella Vasta.
Her finger-painted works on paper unfold in deep black, appearing almost three-dimensional, bodily present. Lines, spirals, and interlaced forms—organic yet structured—create a space that is neither clearly figurative nor purely abstract.

Vasta’s works seem to entangle movement and stillness, gesture and structure, surface and depth. Their strength lies precisely in this suspended state. They feel like snapshots of an unfinished process—embryonic, cosmic, open.

Already then it felt as though these works were not shown here by chance, but entered into a quiet dialogue with the permanent collection.

Antonio Saura – The Dark Core

(Autumn 2025)

That impression led us back to Cuenca in the autumn of 2025, this time with a clear intention:
to look once more—slowly and deliberately—at the works of Antonio Saura, freed from the element of surprise that had shaped our first encounter.

In the SALA Antonio Saura, the atmosphere condenses immediately. Saura’s paintings seem unwilling to remain on the walls. They press outward, rupture, draw the gaze into dark abysses. His art is not decorative; it is confrontational. Black, grey, white—occasionally broken by colour, yet never conciliatory.

Particularly striking are his portraits.
Whether Brigitte Bardot (1959) or Philip II (1967), these are not likenesses, not images of fame or power. They are acts of dismantling. Faces appear fragmented, distorted, charged with inner tension. Identity is not presented—it is questioned.

That Brigitte Bardot passed away on 28 December 2025 in Saint-Tropez lends this portrait an unexpected depth in retrospect. Saura shows no icon, no myth, but a fragile human presence—stripped of glamour, withdrawn from appropriation. In this refusal of idealisation lies the painting’s quiet dignity today.

Where colour appears in Saura’s work, it remains restrained, almost reluctant—as if permitted only briefly to interrupt the dominance of darkness.

The photographs of Saura’s works shown here were taken during this second visit in autumn 2025.

A Quiet Dialogue Across Time

Looking back, the two visits form an unexpected arc.
The black, tactile entanglements of Rossella Vasta from spring 2023 now read like a contemporary continuation—or perhaps a response—to Saura’s radical expressiveness, encountered again two years later.

Where Saura breaks apart, Vasta weaves.
Where he tears open, she condenses.

Both remain serious, existential, physical.

The Fundación Antonio Pérez allows this dialogue to exist without explanation. It grants space to the works—and to the visitors as well, even across years.

Conclusion

Cuenca possesses, in this place, a museum that does not merely collect but thinks.
Those who enter the Fundación Antonio Pérez do not step into a neutral white cube, but into a space of experience—one in which art does not console, but resonates.

And sometimes resonates so strongly that one returns.