Draft:Mural of Sant Víctor de Saurí

Themes
The Mural in Sant Victor, a church in the small village of Sauri, Spain is Santi Moix's largest piece to date, spanning 1,200 square feet which he describes as a garden full of fantasy. The surroundings of the church and the natural landscape of Sauri, led the intervention. He intended to inherit the concept of folk art that approached the natural world from a variety of local colors. The work includes animals like salamanders and sheep, beasts, and flowers surrounded in foamy structures of the color green, in a grass like manner, with details of light pink and yellow. In order to describe the balance between living things and the natural world, Moix illustrates the tools of the farmers in the Pyrenees village that create this balance. Although not directly portraying the people of the Assua Valley, which Sauri sits in, instead, the tools represent them and express Moix's respect to the local community.

Purpose of the Work
Moix wants to be sure that he creates a space which augments the inner world of the visitors, in the sense that one who visits is enlightened to the idea that the presence of nature is a source of love, compassion, acts of kindness, and the feeling of being alive. Moix intended for the immersive tones, details, and graphics on the wall to awaken any viewer's curiosity and feel that they are a part of the work themselves. Ultimately, Moix wants observers to engage in their search for God through close contact with nature, which he believes is facilitated by the porcelain flower hanging from the center of the apse.

Religion in the Mural
Moix perceives that churches used to invoke feelings of fear with depictions of demons and fire, and in contrast, he was interested rather in creating an overwhelming colorful scene. Through his art, Moix hopes to capture the forces of nature from outside the church and to transform the atmosphere of the interior. He compares his efforts to those of Gaudi or the Masters of the Romanesque and Gothic, which to Moix means communicating what is present but not visible to us, only to God, and leads Moix to adopt an interpretation of nature by which it exists inside out.

Artistic Process
The project consists of three phases and the collaboration of more than twenty professionals from different disciplines. Part One took place between September 14th and October 7th of 2015, with the aim of painting all the interior walls of the church using the fresco technique, by which each morning a group of plasterers applied paste to the walls until it was dry for Moix to complete between eight and fifteen hours of painting daily. During Part Two, in November 2016 Moix and his team finished their intervention on the remaining walls and ceilings of the church. Lastly, Part Three was the construction of a large porcelain flower that is located in the center of the Apse, presiding over the altar. This flower was constructed in the workshop of ceramist Joan Raventos with the help of David Rossell and Anna Balleste in the Spring and Summer of 2017 and consists of modeling and firing fifty-six sheets of translucent porcelain on which Moix applies different watered layers of color.

Sponsors and Support
The initial rush for the project came from the villagers that wanted local artist Santi Moix to give new life to the walls of the church. In 2012, when the local government and bishop contacted Moix about painting the interior of Sant Victor he agreed to do so but on his own terms. Despite the occupation of his work in a religious space, he made it known that he would develop the work only if he was given the artistic license free from the traditional obligations of the church or state, such as that of painting saints or martyrs. Ultimately, the Bishopric of the Seu D'Urgell, the Catalonian Government, the Regional council of Pallars Sobira, and the Town Council of Sort gave Moix permission to reinterpret the secular legacy of pictorial representation in the romanesque churches of Spain. The project involved the collaboration of more than twenty professionals from different disciplines that were technically coordinated by the Furniture Restoration Center of Catalonia and the Architectural Heritage Service of the General Decorate of the Department of Culture. The Department of Culture also provided funding, with additional efforts coming from the Council of Lleida and the Town Council of Sort.

Public Viewing
The newly decorated church was inaugurated in November 2018 with two days set for viewing in December before it opened for regularly scheduled viewing in March of 2019. In the first months of its full time opening in 2019 it received 1200 visits, described by the Mayor of Sort at the time, a neighboring large town, as very positive since the church had become a catalyst for the entire Assua Valley due to increased traffic in restaurants and hotels.

Contemporary Art in Religious Spaces
Three decades ago few exhibitions would have brought secular art into a ritual space, however, today examples like that of Moix and unconventional altar pieces are common. The precedent for joining modern art and the church, once thought to be two highly different entities, was pioneered by Dean Walter Hussy and Bishop George Bell in England and Pere Marie-Alain Couturier in France. They were hoping to reinforce a faint relationship between the ritual spaces of Western Christianity and contemporary art, in search of a visual language which was significant in the modern era. Religious spaces and contemporary art hold some fundamental differences but also possess strong similarities in their cultural purpose. The Church and modern art are both dedicated to making meaning, developing sound forms of expressing it, and play a part in destabilizing forms by way of critical and prophetic roles.