Chronicle Team

Equipo Crónica was an artistic group founded in 1964 by three Valencian artists: Manolo Valdés (1942), Rafael Solbes (1940-1981) and Juan Antonio Toledo (1940-1995), who left the project shortly after starting it. The group emerged from the traveling exhibition España Libre (Free Spain) in Italy, organized by the critic Vicente Aguilera Cerni. Along with other artists, the members of the artistic collective were part of Estampa Popular (Popular Stamp), a group of anti-Franco engravers who advocated for a clear and direct figurative art that was understandable to the whole of society.

On this occasion, Imaginart Gallery would like to specifically highlight Equipo Crónica’s participation in the Pamplona Meetings (June 26–July 3, 1972), the largest and most significant international avant-garde festival held in Spain. This summer marks its fiftieth anniversary. More than 350 national and international artists occupied the city with the aim of activating public space under the direction of the event’s promoters, Lluís de Pablo and José Luis Alexanco. Also present were artists, musicians, and intellectuals such as John Cage, David Tudor, Steve Reich, Silvano Bussotti, Laura Dean, and Dennis Oppenheim.

The opportunity to be part of one of the few cultural forums held in the country ultimately convinced many artists, like Solbes and Valdés, who questioned the relationship between the event’s sponsors and the regime. For this reason, Equipo Crónica decided to participate with one hundred copies of a cardboard cutout depicting an agent of the political-social brigade. They distributed them to the audience at the various concerts and activities. The objective of the work “Spectator of Spectators” was to denounce the apparent freedom that the program seemed to grant the artists, which, in reality, was a supervised freedom. Equipo Crónica’s artistic activity extended until 1981, a total of seventeen years that consolidated the artistic collective as one of the most solid and enduring creative groups in the history of art in the country.