Augusto Ferrer-Dalmau: Nostalgia, Cultural Angst, and the Recovery of Aesthetic Carlism

Résumé

Artistic representations of the Carlist wars waned as the movement relinquished its political and discursive agency. In our present century, however, neo-historical painter Augusto Ferrer-Dalmau has reconfigured the aesthetic parameters of Spanish legitimism, while reallocating its ideological and cultural signifiers. This article explores how the resurgence of Carlist military imagery serves as a nostalgic repository of an imagined historical trajectory challenging contemporary political discursive practices. It also examines the visual texts’ function as a reaffirmation of Traditionalism’s unionist identity, decoupled from the legacy of Francoism, and as a contemplative lamentation of a vanishing cultural value system.