Some Words
Robert Ferrer i Martorell, Valencian born in 1978, and Mallorcan by adoption, has been the artist chosen by the Instituto Cervantes to entrust with its exhibition space, at the end of this 2015-2016 season. As happened at the end of last season with El Tono, a French street artist who has developed much of his career in Spain, what it is about once again is a creator of our time confronting our exhibition hall, proposing an intervention in it. In parallel, the Lina Davidov gallery, located on the historic boulevard Saint-Germain, especially receptive to the Spanish art scene, and which since signing him in 2010 has been one of those most attentive to the artist's work, proposes the fourth of the solo shows it has dedicated to him to date: a selection of some of his recent small-format pieces, that is, reliefs and methacrylate boxes before which one understands that his work is of geometric root, but that this geometry is compatible with freedom and with poetry.\n\nTrained at the Faculty of Fine Arts of his native city between 1998 and 2004, Ferrer i Martorell began exhibiting in 2000. In his land he has done so at the Llotgeta, in Mallorca at Joan Oliver Maneu, in Madrid at that very lively place that is Espacio Valverde, which is also taking him to international fairs...\n\nThis installation, titled, somewhat metaphysically and one could also say somewhat Kleean—that business of "making visible the invisible," etc.—Porta oberta a l'invisible, is by no means this artist's first. He has presented them on his adoptive island, and in Madrid, and in Valencia, and it is worth recalling in that sense that he has emerged successfully from the challenge of confronting venerable spaces, for example, in 2011, Can Prunera, in Sòller, or modern ones, for example, the following year, the Bamboo Atrium of the Palacio de la Música in Valencia.\n\nA variant of our Cervantine title is that of the show at the gallery, where he wanted to be even more concise: Porte à l'invisible. (In 2015, his exhibition at the aforementioned Espacio Valverde was titled Fragmentos de lo invisible).\n\nShortly after agreeing with him on the principle of an installation in our hall, we received from Ferrer i Martorell a highly detailed project, with infographics. Although he modified some details on the go, in the heat of action and manifesting a freedom he needs in order not to fall into any dogmatism, I am surprised that there are relatively few differences between project and finished work. The only other artist with whom I have worked, whom I recall as so methodical in his way of confronting a space, is the Swiss painter Helmut Federle, although in that case we are not talking about an installer, but rather someone who studies to the millimeter the fitting of his paintings in the exhibition space he is proposed to occupy.\n\nWe could very well have posed the present catalogue from the infographics, but by common agreement we have decided to delay its publication a little, in order to be able to use in it some of the beautiful photographs, taken by him, of the installation itself.\n\nBasically, Ferrer i Martorell is a geometer, but a... lyrical geometer. Which allows us to relate his poetics, especially that which operates in his reliefs and boxes, with that of Miró or that of Mompó, two other painters of Balearic destiny, the second of whom we presented not long ago at this Cervantes, although the show we dedicated to him did not include any of his plexiglass pieces.\n\nStarting from orthogonality, Ferrer i Martorell arrives at more organic approaches, even, at moments, we could say gestural, whence in our mind, before the type of pieces to which I have just alluded, there arose the names of the most painterly of the surrealists, and of the most "street air" and Jour de fête of our abstract artists of the generation of the fifties.\n\n"Member of the brotherhood of artists friends of air" I have called Ferrer i Martorell elsewhere, thinking of his inscription in a tradition that is that of the constructions of Gabo or of his brother Pevsner, that of the mobiles of a great friend of Miró like Calder, that of the translucent plastics of Vantongerloo or of Moholy Nagy, that of the scenographies of Noguchi, that of the monumental neons of Fontana, that of the penetrables of Soto... In creators like these, and it is clear that the list could be extended much further—until arriving, for example, at the obres febles of Antoni Llena, some of the best that Catalan conceptualism gave—geometry and organicism are not opposing terms...\n\nOne word to which Ferrer i Martorell is especially fond, is the word EXPANSION. His work with space—space as if it were one more "material"—his way of posing Rhythms in space, is a rigorous and sensitive work, of modulation of all the ingredients that contribute to the final result.\n\nLight is another of the "materials"—I think it is understood that I return to insisting on the quotation marks—of predilection of Ferrer i Martorell. Often the titles of his shows and of his installations have referred to it. The word LIGHT tempts poets almost too much: some seem to sprinkle it somewhat at random. Painters tend to be more strict, and tend to handle it in a figurative sense: evocation of lights contemplated in nature. But one must not forget the capacity of kinetic artists, who are not exactly painters nor exactly sculptors either, to incorporate into their creations real light, and in a special way electric light, that is, artificial, and in that sense in Hispanic key one must recall, during the pioneering decade of the fifties, the Cajas de luz, with their light bulbs and everything, of an unforgettable painter and sculptor from Alicante who learned much in the Paris of the fifties, Eusebio Sempere. To him, by the way, his compatriot made a very admiring reference in our auditorium, in the colloquium prior to the opening, citing him as one of his idols. And in passing he also mentioned with praise Pablo Palazuelo, another unforgettable creator, freelance geometer of the same generation as the former, and also Parisian by adoption, in his case for quite a few more years. In our hall, Ferrer i Martorell has posed an installation that contemplates it as a whole, as a container to intervene in, and ephemeral as almost all installations created specifically for an exhibition hall tend to be. He intervenes and transforms several of its walls, both on the ground floor and on the mezzanine. In addition, he makes float in the space of the hall, as a drawing in space, a series of tiny PVC squares hung from almost invisible threads, mobile squares—Calder's shadow—that mark an escape route toward the staircase, where they integrate into what we could contemplate as a virtual column in ascension.\n\nThe result of the intervention on the walls is of a sought-after elementality. Rigorous and at the same time free, in it orthogonality and organicism are combined, or what is the same, straight lines and curves. PVC and metal sheets dialogue harmoniously. The PVC is curved and tensioned by threads again almost invisible, in a game that at moments makes one think of a sort of work of stripping, of taking the skin off the wall... All this brings to my memory the title of his 2013 show at Lina Davidov's gallery: Dévoilant la matière. This work now halfway between painting and sculpture, or to be more exact, bas-relief. Work with something Schwittersian about it, on the Merzbau side, and one must not forget that the one from Hannover operated at the threshold between Dada and constructivism. Work with something Russian about it, on the side of Lissitzky's Proun or Malevich's architectons, and I am citing two artists close to Schwitters, and in whom the temptation of architecture was even stronger than in him. Work with a vocation to remain, and certainly one could very well imagine some of these monumental pieces by Ferrer i Martorell, made permanent, converted into a wall: above all the one of larger dimensions, the one that the spectator encounters on the left upon entering, for me the most fascinating and the most impressive, almost with something of a Mycenaean gate about it, and also the most orthogonal, but in which, as in all the others, orthogonality is in dialogue with curved lines, and the monumental, with a more drawinglike work, those vertical, floating strokes that are like the axis of the construction...\n\nI have just qualified as luminous the exhibition container that we have placed at the disposal of Ferrer i Martorell. Indeed light is used and modulated by him with great intelligence. Here we are speaking of natural light, that which enters through the ample glass wall of our beautiful hall. In some parts of it that light is combined with that projected by some spotlights, necessary above all on the mezzanine, and above all at the end of the day. The word LIGHT is one of the most recurrent in the titles that the artist gives to his pieces, to his installations, to his shows. If La llum de l'horta seems to suggest a landscape reading, of evocation of the fertile landscape that surrounds his native Valencia, another title, Rastres de llum, would invite contemplating things in a more generic key. We return to a certain figuration with La memòria de la llum, and with Llum en extinció, both titles of clear crepuscular nuance, which remind me of two others, Llum que s'apaga, and above all, L'horabaixa, chosen in his day by a painter of an earlier generation, José María Sicilia, post-minimalist who after long years here in Paris, would end up choosing the Island of Calm as his adoptive land. But in the end what reigns in the case of Ferrer i Martorell is El silencio de la luz.\n\nA third and last "material"—last quotation marks, I promise—in play in this installation, is color. If in times past Ferrer i Martorell liked to play above all with the three primaries, so programmatically and effectively claimed at the dawn of modernity by Mondrian, now red and yellow have disappeared from the map, and with them that Mironian joviality that we appreciate in other earlier phases of an artist who today aspires to even greater purity. Everything is thus reduced here to the dialogue between blue, black, and white. With clear predominance of the latter.\n\nThe poetics of Ferrer i Martorell, closer than ever, yes, to white, is of course a Miesian poetics, that is, a post-minimalist poetics of "less is more," but it is also a poetics of the fragment, of weightlessness, of fragility. His work, which opens in many directions, and which if we review it thoroughly—for example via his very well designed website—turns out to be of great formal diversity, must be placed in relation, in addition to with that of the "friends of air" to whom I have made reference almost at the beginning of my words, with that of other subtle creators, capable of conferring poetic tremor to the work of geometry. There we could speak, for example, of someone whom one got to know here, when he was approaching his centenary: Luis Tomasello. Or of a silent Italian who came from metaphysics and encountered on his path the Albersian example: Antonio Calderara.\n\nFerrer i Martorell and I were talking, in our auditorium, about artists who have marked him. I have already said that in the conversation came up Palazuelo, and Sempere. In addition, I mentioned the fact that by his way of combining geometry and organicity, I see him—I already wrote it in my 2013 text—as a spiritual brother of certain Brazilian geometers, and he answered me speaking of his fascination with the work of one of them, Macaparana, recent exhibitor at the Denise René gallery of the Rive Gauche, that is, seven doors from Lina Davidov's hall. I have not yet visited the Palma workshop of Ferrer i Martorell; I know it, however, from photographs taken by him, in some of which by the way natural light plays a fundamental role. I have been, on the other hand, on the upper floor of Macaparana on the Paulista, and in his neighboring studio on a little street near the great artery of the Brazilian megalopolis. Macaparana and Ferrer i Martorell have quite a few things in common, starting with their love for drawing in space, and for the order that reigns in their respective laboratories of builder-dreamers. From that of Ferrer i Martorell, who is also capable of tracing an intimate portrait of chaos (Portrait intime du chaos was the title of his first solo show in Paris), come works of essential beauty like those he has now exhibited at Lina Davidov's gallery, and in it was gestated, via models and via the aforementioned infographics, the project he has so effectively realized in our hall, and which his own photographs document in this catalogue.\n\nJuan Manuel Bonet