Reality Team

Formed in Valencia by Joan Cardells and Jordi Ballester in 1966, it dissolved in 1976 with the arrival of democracy (precisely at what we have established as the starting point of the CAM Collection of Contemporary Art). In Spain during the sixties, after a certain exhaustion of Informalism, new figurative tendencies began to emerge in which they employed languages derived from Anglo-Saxon Pop-Art. This so-called New Figuration or Chronicle of Reality presented in our country a political commitment that combined plastic research with the denunciation of consumer society—still in an embryonic state and, above all, criticism of the prevailing political situation.

Interested in the power of the image—an authentic battlefield for any visual artist, their works systematically depart from photographs taken from magazines, advertisements, catalogs, comics or any other form of printed image. Their limited trajectory is articulated in four series: Home Sweet Home, an ironic revision of consumer society; Of the Old and Garments, critical of the ossified academic model and by extension, of class difference; Of the Portrait of a Portrait, a revision of celebrated works and the last: war exploits or history paintings in which they paint their "unexperienced memory" of the Spanish Civil War.

Text provided by the Mediterranean Foundation. Author: J. B. Peiró.