Saragossa,
Two years ago, Fernando Romero was the winner in the second Pablo Serrano/Juana Francés Call for Artistic Creation and Production, called by the IAACC Pablo Serrano of Zaragoza, which selected a creative project to be exhibited in the rooms of that center after his author could develop it in one of his workshops for several months. The chosen proposal is titled Orography of the invisible and the jury valued his reflection on pictorial practice and the genre of landscape: this artist from Teruel proposed it as a research project that was based on the recreations that science has made of the possible appearance of exoplanets to reflect on the options to represent, necessarily from speculation, spaces that have not been possible to contemplate. To do this, he has examined the characteristics of the materials that determine the physicality and materiality of the painting, in order to analyze how they could contribute to the expression of those orography that we do not know.
Until next July 21, this work will be presented, under the curatorship of Joaquín Jesús Sánchez and the title “In regions so clear”, at the IAACC, where we will have the opportunity to see how, in addition to a vindication of the discipline of painting Today, it represents a turning point in the career of this artist, which has always been marked by the investigation into the concept and tradition of landscape, our relationship with it and our ways of looking, but until recent years he usually addressed it , based on buildings drawn with precision, and full of references to contemporary architecture, immersed in static and almost abstract natures; or of clouds, trees, snow, winds or mountains under powerful gray skies that suggested loneliness. His interest in speculative landscapes was already advancing in the exhibition he offered five years ago, with that same title, at the Museum of Teruel, in which he settled the extent to which modern computer systems have come to illuminate, out of nothing, their own landscapes. , without control in its expansion, autonomous, networked and almost surreal. On that occasion he showed us machine-like and non-human scenarios, lacking geographical or temporal references, which were difficult to associate with traditional laws of representation (at that time, we still did not talk about Artificial Intelligence every day).
This will not be the case in the pieces in this new exhibition; Romero's latest, apparently random orography, which arises from the studied interaction of the different pictorial materials, do refer, although without explicitness, to the tradition of scientific auscultation and lyrical approach to the landscape, with which they share, as pointed out by the curator, the objective of transferring large fragments of reality to the limited space of the support: We owe it to the proximity of both disciplines (cartography and painting) that the nerves of the gullies, the whitened strip of the mountain ranges or the roundels of the lakes appear to us, at the same time, as literal and abstract representations.; and the proliferation and dissemination of zenith photographs of our planet and other bodies in the cosmos, and of cartographic resources, that the profiles of a continent or the orography of an exoplanet can seem incredibly everyday to us, even though we know that no eye will ever be able to see them without technological intermediaries..
When working on his latest compositions, Romero has observed the formal resources and plastic qualities that can be found in that celestial documentation and has modified his own supports (altering, folding to generate unevenness); Furthermore, in the assembly of this exhibition, pieces have been arranged in superimposed layers to remember the structure of the maps used for pedagogical purposes when they are accumulated and to introduce a playful component into the solemnity that usually conveys to us the unknown and potentially infinite.
Fernando Romero. “In regions so clear”
IAACC PABLO SERRANO
Paseo María Agustín, 20
Saragossa
From May 14 to July 21, 2024
