Copperfield Gallery and SCAN present ‘Miseratione non mercede‘, with works by David Escalona, Julia Varela, Oscar Santillan and Marco Godoy. Translated to ‘compassion not gain’, the title draws on a Latin inscription in an old operating theatre. Hidden in the roof of the nearby St Thomas’s Church this was a space where those without money could receive pre-anaesthetic surgical treatment.
Post-war Spain was a culturally complex nation. Bitter with its memories of the Civil War – itself a legacy of the little known Carlist Wars of the 19th century – and divided by the regime of Francisco Franco. With Western politics focused on the USSR and its satellite states, Franco felt secure with his nationalist (anti-communist) stance. When the painter, Carlos Puente de Ambrosio, was born in Santander in 1950, the society he entered was in a state of flux.