Mark Ryden

It’s a name we had not heard before, or couldn’t remember hearing: Mark Ryden. He’s an American artist. The Centro De Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga (CAC) had a temporary exhibit of his work, a retrospective, that was ending on Saturday. Admission to the museum is free. Karen had read TripAdvisor posts raving about the exhibit, with some reviewers saying it was the best thing they’d seen in Málaga. That would be our activity for the Thursday, along with finding out where to get the bus to Marbella on Friday to meet Shelley.

In the morning, we walked down to the bus station near the ferris wheel, which we had passed on our walk out to the Russian museum earlier in the week. When I asked at one of the ticket kiosks, the guy explained that the buses for Marbella leave from another bus terminal, adjacent to the central rail station. (And I actually understood what he was saying, miracle of miracles.) This terminal was for shorter-range buses only, I think. We walked home and had lunch with the idea of coming out again later to investigate further.

Sculpture in front of CAC Málaga

After lunch, we headed first to the CAC. It’s a relatively new museum that opened in 2003. It has a permanent collection but, like its counterpart in Valencia, also mounts many temporary exhibits each year, often with two or three running at the same time. Karen had I think seen some reproductions of the Mark Ryden work on TripAdvisor or somewhere. I was completely unprepared.  

Ryden is fantastc, and fantastical, a modern-day surrealist, who paints in a super-realistic style. He riffs on kitsch and cartoon art, but uses the colour pallet and lighting of classic European art. The content is weird and clearly symbolic. Big eyed girls or young women are the focus in most of the paintings. A baby holding a snake in one hand and a gold band in the other also recurs. Abraham Licoln appears often. Weird. It’s a whole visual language that I couldn’t begin to understand, but found intriguing. Other motifs: meat, innards, bees.

The technique, mostly oil on canvas, is impeccable. Many of the paintings have beautiful custom carved frames that complement the content and often include title plaques. I’m assuming they’re also by Ryden. There is one large wood carving on display that is definitely by him. He’s a very fine carver. And a ceramicist too. There are a few ceramic pieces. All the three-dimensional works echo the themes, motifs and aesthetic of the paintings.

The permanent collection has some fun and/or intriguing pieces, but everything else paled in comparison to the Ryden. He’s a huge, huge talent. So why were we so completely unaware of him?

I’m guessing it’s because the North American art establishment, dominated by art schools and the aesthetic they promote, has a single focus on conceptual art, installations, video, etc. In North America, contemporary painting is viewed as irrelevant, it seems, at least by the art establishment. The Spanish, however – Europeans in general, I suspect – still take painting, even representational painting, very seriously. The majority of works in this museum, at least on this day, with the Ryden exhibit up, were representational or semi-representational paintings.

After the museum, we walked over and found the bus station and confirmed the time for our bus the next day – the express from Málaga to Marbella, leaving at 10:30. Cost: €8.70 each. You can’t buy a return ticket for some reason. We’d have to buy the ticket back once we got to Marbella. We toyed with buying the tickets now, but decided in the end to wait until tomorrow.

On the way home, I photographed some of the wall art along the mostly dry riverbed. It meant hiking down a long ramp from the street into the riverbed, jumping over puddles and tip-toeing through shallow water to get a vantage point, and then holding the camera up to shoot over a construction site fence – but some interesting murals.

There were a couple of kids down there practicing skateboard tricks. The river bottom is paved here; I’m not exactly sure why. This is such a contrast to Valencia’s beautifully transformed riverbed park system with its sports facilities, running paths, gardens, art displays – and the showpiece City of Arts and Sciences at the one end. The river in Málaga, to be fair, is not as wide, so there isn’t as much scope for re-purposing it. But it’s really an eyesore as it sits now. Given the amount of money this city must rake in in taxes on tourist industry businesses, and the amount they’ve spent on other projects, it’s shameful that they leave the river looking like this.

The next day, we were up and out of the apartment uncharacteristically early to catch our bus to Marbella. The day was cool and threatening rain. The weather would not improve. Buying the tickets was no problem. We ended up with about a 30-minute wait. The bus was not the most comfortable we’ve been on. Karen’s seat leaned back too far and her feet couldn’t touch the ground, or even the little fold-down footrest. It made for an uncomfortable ride. Luckily, it was only 45 minutes.

The route was mostly along the A-7 and AP-7, the Meditteranean Motorway. The vistas out the window across to the coastline around Torremolinos and Fuengirola are fantastic – such incredible build-up! These are huge population centres that stretch almost uninterrupted along the coast.

When we arrived at the bus station in Marbella, which is just off the highway, there were no maps and no tourist information kiosk. According to Google Maps, our agreed meeting place with Shelley, the Plaza de los Naranjos in Marbella’s old town, was six or seven kilometers away in the centre. We took a taxi, which was another €6 – the cost of this outing was rising rapidly. By the time we got to the Plaza de los Naranjos, the air was decidedly chill – by far the coolest we’d experienced in Spain this year: 15C – and it was spitting rain on and off.

Although we’d tested text communication with Shelley the day before, I received no response from her to my texts. I was briefly able to log in to a Wi-Fi network and did receive one earlier message from her, asking us to remind her what time we’d agreed to meet. It was 1 p.m., Shelley! But my response would not go through, or at least did not receive a reply. I was starting to be cranky. At this point, the meeting time was still over an hour away.

We wandered around the very pretty old town. Marbella is a city nominally of fewer than 200,000, but in the season there must be more than double that number with visitors filling the condos and hotels strung out along the coast. The old town, the layout of which dates from the 16th century, represents a tiny portion of the city’s total area. Its narrow winding streets and alleyways are full of cute little shops, apartments, restaurants. It’s a tourist paradise. The Plaza de lost Naranjos is its centre.

Our plan was to have lunch with Shelley, then visit Marbella’s Museo del Grabado, a gallery devoted to contemporary Spanish print making. Karen and I found it in our wanders and took note of its location for later. Then we meandered back to the Plaza de los Naranjos. Still no response to texts, and no Wi-Fi to log into. Plus, it was now pelting rain. We huddled under a tree. Was it an orange tree? Maybe. The orange blossoms are starting now and their lovely aroma filled the air. Shelley did eventually appear, ten minutes late, her usual insouciant self. She hadn’t checked her texts. Wah!

Shelley’s theory is: find the local market and you’ll find the best restaurants nearby. This apparently works in Barcelona, around the Mercat de la Boqueria, but not so much in Marbella. The market, which is just outside the old town, is small, and the few restaurants near it not very appealing. So we dove back into the narrow streets of the old town and eventually settled on an unassuming little restaurant on a mostly residential street.

It was attached to some kind of hostel, and apparently family run. The two waiters looked alike enough to be brothers. A young woman the right age to be the wife of one of them occasionally sallied out from the kitchen. The décor was basic: tile floors, plaster walls, chunky dark wood tables and chairs. The clientele seemed to be mostly locals, although there was at least one other tourist couple there.

The food was basic Spanish lunch fare: fish or grilled meat with french fries and salad. I had the menu del dia, which included starter (I had a hearty vegetable soup), main (two pork cutlets and french fries), postres (the standard store-bought flan) and a glass of wine. The others had similar mains plates but from the a la carte menu. It was very satisfying, didn’t cost an arm and a leg, and the place wasn’t overrun with tourists, unlike the cutesy, over-priced restaurants on Plaza Naranjos. Just basic good-quality Spanish grub.

It started raining soon after we came out, so we headed straight to the print museum. It’s housed in part of an old convent which has been lovingly and beautifully restored and converted. So many museums and galleries in Spain are in similarly restored and converted historic buildings. I liked the museum, Karen and Shelley didn’t. There were some interesting photos, some early engravings and aquatints that included a couple of Goyas and Picassos – not prime pieces to be sure but interesting to see. One of the Goyas was the famous self-portrait image of him in a top hat. The finisher was a room with a bunch of bright Miro prints.

By the time we came out, it was starting to clear. We decided we’d go for a walk along the front and find a place to sit and have a drink before it was time for us to cab back to the bus station. We walked for about a half an hour in a chilly breeze with surf pounding on the beach – uncharacteristic for the Med. The beach places seemed to be mostly closed. We eventually decided to go back to Shelley’s hotel and sit inside.

It was a rather pretentious Euro-chic hotel with a big open bar/dining room behind the pool area. We sat in living room furniture and drank the over-priced booze, with irritating techno-something-or-other music playing most of the time over the sound system and winter sports coverage on the big screen TV. We did our best to ignore it all.

Our bus back to Málaga would leave at 18:45. We bid Shelley farewell and headed out from the hotel a little before six. We had 20 or 25 minutes to wait at he bus station. The bus was almost empty and we had the front seats, which is Karen’s prefered position for motion-sickness prevention. Home by 8.