M HKA Ensembles

Book, 20 x 13 cm, 80 p, language: Spanish, publisher: Devenir/Juan Pastor Editor, ISBN: 84-86419-98-0.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2025/872).

Literary synopsis

"In Florencio Cornejo the author tells the brief journey of the protagonist from Arredondo to Ogarrio (towns of the interior of Cantabria linked to Gutiérrez Solana family), to attend the last moments of a relative whose name gives title to the story. During the night journey the Narrator gets sleepy and, in a dreamy state, remembers the few and distant days spent with Florencio Cornejo in Madrid around the year 1873. (…) The best of the story, no doubt, are the paragraphs devoted to the wake and burial of Florencio Cornejo. They are pages at once hilarious, atrocious and bitter, brimming with black humor –so bold and so direct that the reader sometimes can feel almost knocked out."

- Juan Antonio González Fuentes

Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice

"Solana writes as a painter; Salvador Rueda and Juan Ramón Jiménez, each in his own way, which was not so different, also did so. Solana paints as a writer; Goya also made it. The pictures of Solana have, as their pages, adventure; Solana pages have, like his paintings, color. Adventure and color in Solana’s paintings and pages are easy to point out. Solana did not have a vision of the world as a painter, and another vision of the world as a writer. Solana had his own and peculiar vision of the world that interpreted, with brush and pen, without allowing a single escape, nor a single moment of fainting, softening or disloyalty. (…) Moreover: I find it hard to believe that you can find one page of Solana that does not have, in the list of pictures and drawings of our author, its own and intended illustration: even disregarding - by too evident - the themes of the bulls, processions and masks, which are reiterated, occasion after occasion, throughout the catalogue of his paintings, we see that the literary work of Solana – even that which would seem furthest away from his painter’s themes - has, page to page, point-by-point, its concrete and guiding parallel in the traces of his brush or his pencil."

- Camilo José Cela (excerpt of his Nobel Prize speech)