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Exhibitions
- Fernando García
Vino sobre seda
07/06/2017 - 24/07/2017
Time is the essential yardstick against which Fernando García structures his work. There is no beginning and no end; nor are there stages or periods. Everything just happens in succession. Time takes the decisions and approaches, presents different materials, creates fleeting encounters and journeys and suggests light and sea. And it is there, just there, where the exhibition takes place.
On this occasion, under the title Vino sobre seda (Wine on silk), his second solo show in the gallery, his work traces out an infinity of routes with a single direction. A journey he embarked on almost three years ago on the way to Barcelona, and which in a certain way reaches its conclusion in this exhibition. A range of paintings, installations and sculptures make space for themselves within a sumptuous imagination which takes inspiration from both popular sources and customs as well as from sophistication and high culture. Two benches take centre-stage and from these, the gaze is transformed into a contemplative experience. From them, the look is placed in paintings made using wine on silk in which the technique silences the brush and obscures its mark, along with sculptures in equilibrium, sands and stones, hanging climbers and the occasional other mysterious detail, recreate climates, scents, temperatures, echoes, breezes and recollections of the intangible, of what dissolves and is never quite there.
If the same value judgements and considerations that have, over the years, been employed to approach Fernando García’s oeuvre were reused once more, the approach to his work, with changes of time and place, would be much the same. His narrative presents a powerful element of continuity. Form, at first glance, draws distinctions between certain works and others, but these are ultimately small details which, like great cloaks, cover the form without touching the core.
Thus, the ornaments, the procedures and invisible elements, which are innumerable in his work, obey focused exercises of manual ecstasy and reposed reflections.The methodical technique, on the opposite pole of the concept of the sublime, is an essential tool for the artist when it comes to addressing the dedication of time. His work assembles and disassembles itself; it shifts and avoids being pinpointed. Notebooks, notes and annotations which keep changing and interchanging. Games and exercises, poetic and prosaic, banal and transcendental, philosophical and mundane, are liberated through clues and lost recollections.
Traveling and residing are always major references in his work. Gautier or Humboldt, Joan Miró or Juan Muñoz, Cela or Altolaguirre. The ideas of some about others, and of those others about themselves, about the other and about origins; this is something on which García feeds in order to trace out a narrative according to attractions, traditions, fixations and yearnings. A history brimming with anecdotes and legends, full of table talks, sunsets and landscapes.
Just when we think we have discovered the motive or reason behind Fernando García’s work, we rapidly find ourselves disorientated once more. There is no fixed point. Slippery, his work always seems to find a way out. Like the breeze and the glint, it escapes us between our fingers.
Fernando García thanks C.M. for a sentence he told him after watching the movies by the Galician filmmaker D.C. at the Filmoteca de A Coruña in the presence of C.R-M., M.B.G., A.C.U. and J.H. among others.