He recommended to the artists, that great cynic and vividor, that in the end it was our portento of Cadaqués, Salvador Dalí, that they did not worry about perfection, because they would never reach it. Many of them, moreover, stayed at the doors, or failing, halfway, of that metaphorical Olympus, which is the Fame and in the least of the cases, there were even those others who were born immune to the ailments of the ambition and being carried away by a current of romantic productivity, they forgot voluntarily of it, anyone would say that happily possessed by that lamia that sometimes become the Muse, who does not manage to spare fevers of industriousness to those who for some misunderstood reason or circumstance, agrees to point with his volatile finger.
I think that Ulpiano Checa was one of those artists who, even having access to that factory of dreams but also of outrages, as today we have been discovering what was and what continues to be Hollywood, never worried about reaching those Olympic laurels perfection to which Dalí alluded maliciously, passing through the History of Art, like a little spring breeze that barely manages to gently caress the corollas of the poppies in the field.
The truth is that far from what was his environment, that is, his place of birth and where he made most of his monumental work, Colmenar de Oreja -a beautiful town, belonging to the Autonomous Community of Madrid- is barely known to this genuine artist, who paradoxically, made a varied and prolific work.
Certain it must be, likewise and in my particular way of seeing the subject, the popular saying that there is no evil that does not come well and if it was deprived of sufficient recognition beyond its land, Justice - at least the poetic , believe it, exists - it was good to tip a balance in his favor when his neighbors, no doubt proud of him and above all grateful to the magnificent frescoes -among them, a curious Annunciation- that he made at the head of the church-fortress raised by the knights of the Order of Santiago when the place was reconquered from the Muslims, it honored him, dedicating a museum that collects the most important of his extensive artistic work.
A really impressive collection, which brings together designs, sketches, sculptures-among which there is a singular reference to our most universal knight, the ingenious gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha and his faithful squire Sancho Panza- and about a hundred paintings of the most diverse nature, among which there is no shortage of references to that melancholy theme of the passage of time -that the poet Luis Cernuda defined as the 'Byzantium syndrome' and possibly that was also the meaning that Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer wanted to convey in his poem when he spoke of those swallows who would never return to Seville - which to me, particularly, reminds me of that unbridled race between a car whose horses run to the limit of its possibilities and a railroad, which although fed its boilers with a coal extracted from wounds of the earth, predicted the victory of progress - evidently, with all its consequences - on the irremediable decadence of The past.
But the part of the work that brought the prolific Ulpiano to that 'boulevard of broken dreams' that is Hollywood - as the singer Joaquín Sabina would say - were his extraordinary compositions, which were based on the writers and decorators of such a multinational show , to make, at least, two blockbusters: Ben-Hur and The Last Days of Pompeii.
If the first highlight those sparks of magnificence in the depictions of the horse race-scene where the traitor Mesala bites the dust and yet, surrenders his soul possessed by hatred and pride-or that magnificent simulation of the naval battle that It was held in the Coliseum -nothing to see, we must recognize, with which we traditionally celebrate in the Puente de Vallecas every July 16, coinciding with the feast of the Virgen del Carmen- of the second, shakes the implicit drama at the bursting of Vesuvius, whose lava and whose burning ashes became the unexpected angel of death that fell-and in doing so, paradoxically, came to grant immortality-over the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, as brilliantly described by Bullwer-Lytton in his novel.
Scene, on the other hand, that highlights the great psychological vision of the artist, placing in front of the spectator, human attitudes as varied as the nobility - those who try to save the woman, the children, the parents or even the companion animal- or stupid avarice, like the one who is not willing to lose their jewels and carries a chest full to the brim, which will finally be as heavy and solid as the boiling lava that is about to turn it into an irremediable statue For all eternity.
[Hospital de la Fuenfría, Cercedilla, Madrid, Saturday, August 4, 2018]
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