Garden of Delights in Matadero (Madrid): schedules, tickets

How would you have done El Bosco in the 21st century his famous work The Garden of Earthly Delights? Would it be in digital, sound or motion format?

You will find the answer in the exposure The Garden of Earthly Delights: a look at Hieronymus Hieronymus's masterpiece from the contemporary creation that is presented in Nave 16 of Matadero Madrid until February 27.

In our time, it is possible to reissue the famous triptych in a new immersive adventure which offers multiple perspectives, ideas and current visions of this Renaissance painting.

The exhibition covers works from the ONLY Collection which brings together fifteen international artists; Each one has given their personal touch to new works based on the Renaissance triptych through current technology, that is, with artificial intelligence, sound art, video games, 3D digital animation, painting or sculpture.

A new look for this 16th century Renaissance work now bears the names of SMACK, Mario Klingemann, Miao Xiaochun, Cassie McQuater, Filip Custic, Lusesita, La Fura dels Baus- Carlus Padrissa, Mu Pan, Dan Hernández, Cool 3D World, Sholim, Dustin Yellin, Enrique del Castillo, Dave Cooper y Davor Gromilovic.

They are the reinterpreters of El Bosco that make different approaches to the original work through almost 20 works, most created specifically for this exhibition.

Hieronymus Hieronymus's Garden of Earthly Delights

Five centuries separate us from The Garden of Earthly Delights that the Flemish artist painted, but the fascinating power of his work continues to attract all audiences.

In fact, it is one of the most visited works of the Prado Museum next to Meninas by Velázquez.

The original painting of El Bosco It was painted in .515, and it is a complex work full of small stories and details, which captures a convoluted fantasy world.

An emblematic and enigmatic work presented in three parts: the Paradise, on the left, the Earthly life (the garden of delights) in the middle, and to the right, the hell.

An underworld also known as the musical hell by the numerous representation of instruments, used to torture sinners.

It is an oil painting on oak wood in the format of a triptych, which is used especially in the religious context.

If you look at it closed, the image that is formed is that of the round world on the third day of the The Creation, in which it is the earth without inhabitants, still without color, nor sunlight; It is a grayish scene, with God from above contemplating the globe.

A painting that the surrealists really liked and that served as inspiration for artists of the stature of Dalí, Miró o Max Ernst.

The Garden of Earthly Delights from new angles

Nothing better than a labyrinth to enter the exhibition, a immersive installation which is traversed like a winding labyrinth, without walls, through cardboard panels of illuminated packaging.

A montage with dim lights, which seems to take us into a dream world, half in the dark, in which the notion of time is lost, a space designed by the Herreros architecture studio with the purpose of surprising visitors.

As soon as we enter, the music is responsible for introducing us to this exhibition, and it does so through a umbraphone, which means shadow and sound; a device created by Enrique del Castillo that scrambles the bars of a score on three optical readers and celluloid films.

The result is five compositions to recreate the flamenco Renaissance atmosphere of that time, which recover sound extracts from Joaquin Despriez y Adrian Willaert, contemporary composers El Bosco.

You can listen to these original fragments through QR.

Sculpture also appears on this route, and we find it in ““Delicious Temptation”, a ceramic triptych Laura Lasheras, better known as “Lusesita”.

Three scenes that tell a particular story of the Genesis, in a world inhabited by mice that blend in with elongated fingers, beaks and tongues.

Through the ceramic windows we anticipate the digital universe of the Serbian sholim Known for his crazy GIFs and looping animations. Before the viewer, four scenes in this format of madness that dismantle heads.

The Chinese Miao Xiachun presents his particular “Microcosmos” in an installation made up of nine panels that allows us to observe heaven and hell from various perspectives.

To complete this space, they show us a digital and narrative video.

For its part, Philip Custic, known for designing the album image of Rosalia, the ill will, presents his work to us "Homo-?" in a sequence of panels, where he imagines the evolution of the human being in a kind of timeline in which two human figures would represent Alpha y Omega.

The question of the title aims to leave in the air what our destiny is.

Among the compositions that attract the most attention is “The garden of delights by Carlos Padrissa”, one of the six creative directors of the Fura dels Baus.

Three moving images on the same panel, with human DNA chains, that we can contemplate from a vibrating platform accompanied by pulsating music that seems to accentuate the madness that our heads contain in these hectic times.

Very close we discovered a figure created with pieces of paper placed between sheets of glass.

Is “Psychogeography Study 79”, a body made of collage, work of Dustin Yellin, which he himself describes as frozen cinema.

To whet your appetite before reaching the spectacular “SPECULUM”, the giant triptych emblem of the exhibition, we find the enlarged detail of six characters from the series by the Dutch collective Smack.

The objective is to confront the current hell and the problems of this century, very different from those of Bosch.

The center of attention are the images of a man tied to a hashtag, enslaved by social networks, an obese figure of junk food, or a body with two heads kissing, expressing individuality and self-love.

The paintings of the Canadian David Cooper They are a real carnival, an orgy of penis-plants and nipple-flowers.

The digital animations of the group also stand out. Cool 3D world of extravagant animals and deformed humans, along with the work of Mario Klingeman, “The Garden of Ephemeral Details”, which plays with the viewer's memory.

The final culmination is a huge screen 21 meters long, which recreates on a large scale the updated version of the original Garden of Earthly Delights.

“SPECULUM” It is made up of three LED screens of 4x7 meters each, in which a landscape full of strange characters emerges, many in motion, loaded with symbols and current references, which try to put us in front of a mirror and invite us to reflect on the numerous addictions that surround us.

To the right is modern-day hell.

A horrendous scenario of mental torture, which is no longer interpreted only with fire, as in the past; Now we are tied to social networks, to gambling addiction, to antidepressants, we pollute more than necessary, and all under the incredulous gaze of the animals that try to understand us.

These are some of the ideas that we see reflected, for example, in trees from which processed foods sprout, numerous cameras, flying drones and eyes that watch us, along with coats designed with colored pills and characters tormented by syringes.

On the left, the Eden of artificial grass, with animals, a bust of Einstein and many eyes together with one Adán y Eva that turn their backs on each other.

In the middle, the Paradise, a place inhabited by characters obsessed with their image, headless chickens or trees in which fruit does not bloom.

They are representations of contemporary malaise filled with isolation, technology and self-destruction.

Hours The Garden of Delights in El Matadero

You can visit the exhibition at Matadero Cultural Center, Legazpi Square 8, until February 27.

The opening hours of The Garden of Delights in Matadero Madrid They are from Tuesday to Thursday, from 17 p.m. to 21 p.m., and Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, from 12 p.m. to 21 p.m.

La Admission is free, but you have to reserve it in advance because there are capacity restrictions.

They appear every Tuesday on the website, but be careful because they fly by and run out in a few hours.