COPE Berlanga, the multidisciplinary artist "even abuse" who wasted talent

The musician Carlos Berlanga, who died in 2002, was also an artist "multidisciplinary to the point of abuse, because everything he did he did well and wasting talent", according to the painter and graphic designer Pablo Sycet, curator of the Carlos Berlanga exhibition. The Eternal Return, which will open next Friday at the Niemeyer Center in Avilés.

The exhibition aims to recover the artistic legacy in other disciplines of the author of some of the most recognized Spanish pop hits of the 1980s, such as "Who cares" or "Not you nobody", someone capable of "painting, drawing or converting a song in a success in what it takes for a bird to pass, a trajectory cut short by his premature death at the age of 42 according to Sycet.

Sycet, a personal friend of Carlos Berlanga since the eighties, in the middle of the Madrid scene, and until his death on June 5, 2002, has remembered the artist as the most talented person he has ever met and who, despite his success in the world of music -Kaka de Luxe, Alaska and Dinarama- always felt more comfortable in his facet as a painter.

He complained in his later days that music had given him everything, in terms of fame, money and glory, but, nevertheless, as a painter he needed a vindication like the one in this exhibition because that 'eternal return' is what does: continuously return to our lives every time one of his songs casually sounds, he pointed out in an interview with Efe.

Berlanga, he has recalled, felt like a plastic artist first of all because, to write a song and although he only needed the guitar, he then followed a more sophisticated production process, a process that painting does not require.

An outstanding student of the masters of the pictorial avant-garde, he had no qualms about reinterpreting themes or ways of executing Picasso, Matisse, Stuart Davis, Dalí and other artists who were the pinnacle for him, convinced that there was nothing new under the sun. and that the only thing left was to use a shredder and take advantage of themes that were already in museums.

For Syceta, the "jewel" of the exhibition, which will remain open until April 17, is an unfinished painting by a teenager Carlos and his father, the filmmaker Luis García Berlanga, on loan from the family and in which the figure of a mysterious unidentified lady in a room.

The exhibition brings together 200 works of all kinds, ranging from a selection of his paintings, to drawings, his only known sculpture, graphic design works, original autographs of his song lyrics, sketches or work materials, as well as album covers designed by him, like those published by Alaska and Dinarama, or movie posters like Matador, by Pedro Almodóvar.

The pieces are accompanied by some twenty portraits of Berlanga himself made by renowned photographers such as Alberto García-Álix, Javier Vallhonrat, Miguel Trillo or Pablo Pérez-Mínguez and by a selection of more than thirty works by a group of artists who shared moments of his personal and creative life as Alaska, Pedro Almodóvar, Nacho Canut, Juan Carlos Eguillor, Fabio McNamara, Carmen Santonja or Gloria Van Aerssen, among others.

The exhibition is completed with a sound space where you can listen to an anthology of their songs recorded at the presentation concert of Alaska and Dinarama on the TVE program The Golden Age, as well as an interview with the members of the group by Paloma Chamorro .

The eternal return supposes, in the opinion of its curator, a return to Berlanga's youthful stage, a decade of the eighties marked in Spain by a newly released freedom and confirms the evolution "for the worse" of society "at least in question of freedoms and attitudes towards life.EFE

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