The Bierzo Museum presents an exhibition of paintings by Adolfo Alonso Ares, created with soil from Las Médulas and strokes of Abad Dom Bueno’s Mencía wine.
Yesterday, the courtyard of the Bierzo Museum in Ponferrada was filled with roosters and dragons. With earth stains. And with strokes of wine. This was made possible by Bodega Abad Dom Bueno and the Mencía from its Carracedo wine, which, along with the red clay from Las Médulas, served as raw material for the Maragato artist and poet Adolfo Alonso Ares to create his unique bestiary; a collection of fifty images, adorned with poetic texts that aim to condense the very essence of El Bierzo.
The exhibition ‘Autumn Legend,’ inaugurated yesterday with the attendance of the Mayor of Ponferrada, Samuel Folgueral, Alonso Ares himself, and businesswoman Adriana Ulibarri, who acknowledged the “crush” she felt for the Maragato painter’s work, will now be on display for ten days as an intimate tribute to the Bierzo autumn that fellow painter Andrés Viloria once showed the author of the drawings.
Adolfo Alonso’s roosters and dragons, with Alonso himself becoming a true ‘Berciano’ yesterday, are made of wine and paint. They bear the imprints of man, of the golden earth. And it is not strange, the artist explained, that earth and wine have mingled in El Bierzo’s autumnal color palette, because they are at the origin of its myths. Carracedo, named after a village and a monastery, “is an intense wine, and not all wines paint the same, not all have the intensity to capture it on paper,” said the poet and painter during an inauguration that included a tasting of the winery’s broth, “the old gold of El Bierzo,” as defined by its technical director, José Luis Santín. The collection of images, like the wine, is laden with symbolism. It is no coincidence that the roosters, present in all the villages of El Bierzo, recall, Alonso said, “the dawn of man”; the dragons, the corbels of medieval monasteries and churches; and the earth stains, the imprints of the hands and feet—”the heartbeat of this wine,” the artist recalled—of those who built the landscape of El Bierzo.