Located in the Hospital de St Saver, Loop Festival presents Fuego en Castilla. The piece, part of Val del Omar’s Elemental Triptych of Spain, composes a somnambulist essay on Tactile Vision: sculptures, crosses and religious figures from the Baroque inhabit the National Museum of Sculpture in Valladolid in a play of light and sound. 

Hospital de St Saver is home to the Casacuberta Marsans Collection of Hispanic art, comprising medieval and Baroque painting and sculpture, as well as works from the turn of the twentieth century. During the festival, Fuego en Castilla is screened in the exhibition galleries, entering a dialogue with the Collection; with Baroque religious works, similar to those included in the film, as well as paintings by José Gutiérrez Solana and Darío de Regoyos, two key figures of the so-called “Black Spain” (España negra) movement, who shared with the filmmaker from Granada a strong interest in the dark, tenebrist aspects of reality. This dialogue is further reinforced by a number of changes to the exhibition design surrounding the film screening, highlighting Solana’s first painted processional scene: Procession in Toledo (1905).

Fuego en Castilla deconstructs a Castilian procession during the Holy Week, a recurring subject in the work of both Solana and Regoyos. Through Val del Omar’s film and the works displayed around it, visitors can experience Baroque tenebrism and the mysticism around death that shaped Spanish art in the early twentieth century.