Can collections alone define an exhibition’s identity and meaning?

Some of that ambiguity begins to clear when we encounter a painting by the Spanish artist Salvador Dalí. What may be understood from the inclusion of this painting, whose creator once declared, "I am Surrealism", is that the organisers appeared to care little for the distances separating one artistic movement or genre from another. Their concern seemed instead to lie in the museum's works and in making them fit their idea of contemporaneity.

This is contemporaneity in a narrow Catalan mould. It cannot, therefore, serve as the basis for a critical reading through which history might be reconsidered. It is difficult, for instance, to accept Koons and Dalí being gathered under one roof. Nor do I believe that the storerooms of any museum are always a source of inspiration. Exhibition organisers, however, have another point of view, one marked by a palpable measure of condescension, as though to evade critical scrutiny.

A borrowed doll

The order in which the exhibits have been arranged is neither important nor instructive. I begin with 'Jojo', a children's doll enlarged by CJ Hendry, the Australian artist based in New York. Many contemporary artists now do this. The giant lamp bear standing at the centre of Hamad International Airport in Doha is perhaps the most famous example. That work is by the Swiss artist Urs Fischer. In reality, Fischer did not sculpt it. He submitted a small version, perhaps the original doll, perhaps something he had bought from the market, to a workshop so that it could be enlarged in a manner suited to an airport that rivals the world's largest in terms of capacity and abundance of services. 

The exhibition organisers say that Hendry "transforms familiar objects into playful visual experiences that explore value and the emotional pull of material culture", and that "her soft, rounded form recalls the visual language of contemporary character design, from figures such as Labubu to animated worlds such as Disney". As becomes clear, verbal play has not prevented the world of childhood from being presented as a source of inspiration, although there is none here. Early copies have become substitutes for innovative works of art. In our age, with its loosened ethical standards, the search for originals is of little use. There are sculptors, some of them Arab, whose works are executed in China, while the sculptor's role is confined to producing miniatures. It is even said that some provide no more than small illustrative drawings or clay maquettes.

In the 1980s, an Iraqi artist travelled to South Korea and spent around three months there supervising the production of a bust of the late president Saddam Hussein. Clearly, that journey formed part of a broader operation of corruption, one that would later be marketed within the framework of contemporary art.

Banksy: from the street to the museum

Asking whether the British artist Banksy is modern or contemporary does not explain his inclusion in an exhibition already troubled by the question of its own identity. The elusive artist, who may in fact be a group of artists bound by a professional partnership, produces work that bears many of the marks of street art: directness, broad outlines with little interest in detail, a predominance of mischievous, provocative, and satirical ideas, and a deliberate sidelining of the aesthetic dimension.

From this standpoint, such art seems ill-suited for display in galleries. What galleries and museums present amounts to little more than exhibiting reduced versions of works Banksy had previously executed on walls in various cities. These miniatures have stripped the original works of their force, leaving them to resemble postcards rather than works of art.

Banksy's populism is the foundation of his art. It is an art built on the immediacy of its effect and on its attachment to transient political events. Banksy is certainly no modern painter. The man, assuming he is one man, paints with a simplified realist vision and shows no direct or indirect interest in the principles of modern painting. His elevation of the conceptual dimension at the expense of the aesthetic does not grant him legitimacy to join the ranks of contemporary artists. Banksy is a traditional painter, and he has invented no working mechanism capable of freeing painting from its illustrative frame. What, then, is the meaning of including him in this exhibition? I am convinced that Banksy's fame blinded the organisers to the possibility that Banksy may have no real connection to art at all.

A modernist painter of an anxious kind

"What matters to me is that a brushstroke should occur in a single movement. Every brushstroke is a reflection of the moment in which it was painted. For this reason, all my paintings are personal diaries," says Barcelona-born Yago Hortal, in an attempt to clarify his double relationship with time: the time of painting and his own personal time.

The exhibition includes two works by the artist, whose paintings reflect a troubled and shifting modernity and offer a freer, more varied vision of reality. His use of bright, powerful colours, applied to the surface of the canvas with an electric stroke that is vibrant, precise, and carefully considered, gives the work a vitality, as though the artist had shaken matter itself in order to begin a dialogue with it. In doing so, he reformulates the historical concept of pictorial abstraction and discovers a new language that seeks to recreate colour's face and temperament.

The model proposed by Hortal's art does not draw a dividing line between modernity and contemporaneity by returning to their prevailing definitions. His art is abstract, yet its presentation within a contemporary vision remains possible and acceptable in light of the artist's own pictorial experience. Hortal, whose works seem not to have been made with traditional materials, insists on giving the surfaces of his paintings the character of a gleaming electric flash. Although that gleam is the product of a technical device rooted in a secret formula for mixing materials, it has opened the doors of contemporaneity to Hortal's works, since they constitute an attempt to use new materials unfamiliar to the making of the artwork.

Perhaps the matter is more complex than that. We must look at his paintings with our present eyes, the very eyes on which the exhibition organisers are betting, rather than through our prior knowledge. Hortal is the one who embodies the spirit of contemporaneity, not Warhol, whose silkscreen work is displayed here and offers yet another repeated image of Joseph Beuys, one of the most important figures in the history of contemporary art.