This

The mind is a horse; even though one holds the reins, an unexpected noise or a handful of ferns is enough to stray from the path. And yet whoever has never departed from the established route is condemned to travel the same trails over and over again.

Fernando Mastretta began his journey with us with an exhibition of works on paper that contained a symphony of sensations, of possible vectors. The title of the exhibition "Dudo" was already the testimony of a crossroads, of an interior laboratory where poetry and painting spun at the rhythm of jazz.

As Fernando himself explains: "Like the tamer and the lion, the painter must understand the very nature of painting in order to domesticate it." Painting is to a certain extent a wild animal and cannot be directed without first having listened.

Five years have been necessary in the jungle living with lions to move from DUDO to THIS, from the documentary-safari of a search to the celebration of the discovery of a continent as concrete as it is unlimited.

It is difficult to relate the tremendous euphoria that our trip to a house in an unknown village in Soria meant for us, where Fernando had consolidated the exhibition we now present. There was all the richness of ideas and Mastretta's inner world, but formalized with a forcefulness and clarity that were simply overwhelming.

A perfect balance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the representation of a reality both abstract and concrete, a collection of great ideas, each one powerful and singular but which nevertheless continue to configure a coherent universe, the exhibition is what we gallerists colloquially call an authentic whopper.

Fernando comments that he has made a voluntary abandonment of the myth of the "noble savage" so influential in twentieth-century painting, and has become aware that the expressive possibilities of painting lie in the painter who imposes himself on its nature.

For this reason Fernando Mastretta has managed to gather the knowledge of one who has lived with gorillas and lions with the energy and clarity of one who has succeeded in bringing them to his terrain.

The hero has returned home, the sleeper has awakened. This, this, the thing, there it is.

We await you with enthusiasm.

Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart