Exhibitions

The Bilbao Fine Arts Museum is a part of Daniel Tamayo's (Bilbao, 1951) artistic career, just as it has been for so many artists of his and subsequent generations. After the 2011 exhibition entitled Fabulario, which displayed a selection of his recent paintings, the museum is now presenting a very special publishing project that it has produced conjunction with the artist thanks to the support of the Fundación Bancaria BBK: the publication in the Basque language of a book containing 100 of the celebrated Fables in Castilian Verse by the writer Félix María de Samaniego (Laguardia, Álava, 1745–1801), illustrated by Tamayo. Alegiak is being presented in room 7 alongside the original images and several historical copies of the Fables. A QR code provides access to the audios of the literary texts in Basque and Spanish.

Throughout his fertile artistic career, Tamayo has developed a creative strategy in which he systematically uses drawing—initially in pencil, and digital since 1990—in the genesis of images that he then takes to the canvas or paper in compositions that he organises and imbues with a playful, ironic or surreal spirit. For this occasion, the Bilbao-based artist has developed 100 drawings that support the moralising aim, with universal value, at times satirical, of these short stories, most of which feature animals that are often anthropomorphised. In this way, this new publication falls within the tradition of fable illustrations which seek to reinforce the story’s cautionary message, that is, the moral, through the use of allegorical images. Tamayo updates the text, which is still relevant today, with a contemporary iconography and an exclusively digital artistic practice that is perfect for crafting images with his hallmark style: forms with defined lines and flat colours.

Samaniego’s Fables open up a world populated with animals, human characters and objects that are often found in the imaginary of Tamayo, who has occasionally drawn inspiration from children’s animations. The outcome is this original edition in which Tamayo’s hallmark colours have been pared down to two tones: red and black.

In line with the masters of the genre—including Aesop, Phaedrus, Jean de la Fontaine and José Antonio Uriarte—in 1787 Samaniego published the first complete edition of his fables in two versions, one of them luxuriously embellished with neoclassical-style prints that were drawn and engraved by different artists. The texts had appeared several years earlier, in 1781 and 1784, in two separate volumes, and since then numerous editions have been issued, some of them with illustrations by prominent artists, such as the ones by the French illustrator J.J. Grandville in the nineteenth century.

The museum’s publication is based on the translation into the unified Basque language by Koldo Biguri for a bilingual edition—by professor Emilio Palacios Fernández—promoted in 2004 by the Provincial Council of Álava, which provided this new version. The text retains the regular verses, which are often used in fables to make them easier to memorise and therefore to maintain their instructional purpose. In this case, Biguri uses the structure called ‘zortziko mayor’ from the Basque fable tradition, somewhat briefer than the one used by Samaniego, with several variations. The translator thus manages to keep the text as close to the original as possible.