Babelia - El País publishes an essay dedicated to the memory of Roberto Fernández Balbuena
May 9, 2023
"The Split Life of the Defender of the Prado" is an essay by Enrique Andrés Ruiz dedicated to the memory of Roberto Fernández Balbuena and his outstanding participation in the protection and custody of the artistic heritage -mainly the great paintings of the Prado Museum- during the Civil War.
"The episode in Balbuena's Mexican life which is of most interest to me concerns precisely those photographs exhibited for the first time in Madrid at the Freijo gallery and hidden until then in the difficult intimacy of the family life. In them echoes of the painter he might have become in the 1920s, influenced by the new objectivity, the cactus, the polished shape of eggs, the technical devices on immaculate tables. Rulfo's excellence as a photographer is well known. Balbuena's excellence alongside him, in the photographic excursions they shared (around the same time, moreover, that he was writing Pedro Páramo), is somewhat less so."
Enrique Andrés Ruiz
BABELIA, EL PAÍS, Saturday 6 May 2023