Art addresses absence as if it were a lost presence.
— Maurice Blanchot
Twenty-two paintings, twenty-two windows looking out onto a layered memory—not only personal but cultural, archetypal. Each work includes a book: not a mere object, but a body, a sacrament, a relic of thought turned visual flesh. Bermejo does not simply quote—he performs an act of possession and reinvention. The mythical figures of Caravaggio and Magritte, the silent unease of Hopper, the desperate geometries of Picasso, the sacred enigma of El Greco, even pop spirits like Walt Disney, are unearthed and reassembled into a pictorial alphabet that seeks not to explain, but to unveil.
Curator Fernando Zamanillo speaks of a “synthetic art manual.” But this is no didactic compendium—it is an apocryphal breviary, where knowledge disassembles and reassembles like in a fever dream. The paintings do not narrate, do not illustrate: they bear witness to absence. Each canvas is a fragment of a lost language, an attempt to salvage time through the aesthetic act.
Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue that is itself a work of art: poems—not commentaries, but echoes—penned by Zamanillo; photographs by Javier Lamela that document the undocumented; and graphic design by María José Arce, who organizes the disorder with a near-mystical delicacy.
Bermejo (1949–2024) never painted to communicate, but to resist. Resist oblivion, vacuous aestheticization, the noise of the world. His painting is an act of subtraction: to reduce is to preserve, to blur is to rescue. In him, nature and culture merge without reconciliation. His canvases are frictional spaces, where landscape is not background but consciousness, and every form is the precipitate of an inner struggle between order and void.
Art Book is not a final word. It is a postponed beginning, a message in a bottle for a time still capable of reading. In the mute light of the room, Bermejo’s paintings glow like flames that continue to burn.
The history of art is the return of the cultural unconscious through visual forms.
— Aby Warburg
MAS | Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Santander and Cantabria is a permanent public institution, owned by the Municipality of Santander, non-profit, and at the service of society. Open to the public, it acquires, preserves, studies, exhibits, and disseminates its artistic and cultural heritage for the purposes of study, knowledge, education, communication, and leisure.
MAS is a place of exchange—of ideas, knowledge, and debate—a museum dedicated to dialogue and to reconciling the values of modern, contemporary, and current culture. It is a space devoted to research, education, and the free circulation of ideas, valuing artists who allow us to imagine new worlds, challenge us to think about new forms of relationships, and help us—through their works—to better understand both the past and the time we live in.
Founded in 1908, MAS has evolved progressively: from a generalist museum (1908–1947), to a local and regional art museum (1947–1989). A further transformation (since 1990) has shaped it into a museum specialized in modern, contemporary, and current art—national and international—with a now well-established development. Today, MAS is a place for encounter, knowledge, thought, creation, and discourse, with the primary goal of promoting the understanding of modern, contemporary, and current art, making it accessible to the public in its various forms and expressions, and enhancing the social communication of the plastic, visual, audiovisual, technological, and sound arts.
The object (the works) and the subject (visitors and artists alike) thus become co-protagonists of the institution’s offering, which includes collections, activities, and events, its sustainable work, and its cultural project.
To fulfill its objectives, MAS—consistent with its specialization and its peripheral and decentralizing character, attentive to local and regional artistic talent, and characterized by a timeless and transversal approach—pursues the following main goals and activities:
- Promoting knowledge and cultural and artistic communication, based on creativity and dialogue, as a true project of interactive action, with a strong local and regional social commitment, yet also universal and global, always maintaining an accessible and close dimension, where object and subject hold equal importance.
- Exhibiting its collections under suitable conditions for contemplation and study, while ensuring the protection, conservation, and restoration of artistic and cultural heritage.
- Expanding and developing the heritage collection of modern, contemporary, and current art—both national and international.
- Developing temporary exhibition programs and other events.
- Carrying out educational, outreach, training, and consultancy activities, as well as scientific, research, and technical initiatives related to the museum's content.
- Collaborating with museums, universities, foundations, centers, and cultural institutions—public and private, national and international—to encourage the exchange of knowledge and experience through shared networks and to jointly organize exhibitions, events, or other artistic, cultural, or scientific projects.
- Developing research programs, along with the production, publication, and dissemination of catalogues and monographs of scientific, critical, essayistic, or popular value.
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