Some Words
To glimpse the process of a great work is what Robert Ferrer so generously offers us in this exhibition: showing the plans, maquettes, and snapshots of different moments in which one can appreciate how the aluminums unfold until they reach their equilibrium and poetic power.
One of Robert Ferrer's particularities is the importance he gives to manual work. That singular freshness his work possesses within a tradition as analytical as geometry is directly related to the thinking of the hand, to that fierce determination to manufacture himself each and every one of his works.
That is why I invite all those fortunate enough to be enjoying this exhibition to contemplate each and every one of its parts not only as the abstract phases of a project but as the manual unfolding of someone who bends, marks, corrects, compares, holds, glues, and manipulates space.
Our increasingly computerized mind forgets those realms in which the result is not the mere execution of a plan. Just as a living being is more than the mathematical development of its genes, in art everything that happens in between is very important.
It is that mysterious place between intuition and manipulation, between plan and result, where new worlds are born and unfold; it is there that the difference between technique (τέχνη) and technology lies.
Robert always works through the development of families in which a new idea appears, permutes, multiplies, develops, and gives rise to the birth of a new family. All this occurs with a very particular tempo, with its variations, scales, and leitmotifs.
After a multidimensional journey through the different creative processes, we conclude the tour with the work, the only work around which this particular exhibition orbits.
Contemplating it, one imagines that someone has opened a space in the wall to reveal what was hidden. Alongside the spatial and chromatic openings, fine aluminum lines oscillate in unstable equilibrium with the slowness and intensity of a perpetual search for meaning.
Geometry, like music, in my understanding encodes a great mystery that brings into play mathematics, perception, feeling, and intellect; perhaps that is why Schopenhauer argues that if we managed to solve the enigma of music, we would solve the enigma of the universe.
Understanding why the slight inclination of one square over another can make us vibrate is beyond our reach, and perhaps it is better that way. Robert's hands, like those of a pianist, know, explore, and share a universe in which we can, temporarily and in silence, rethink everything anew.
(Jacobo Fitz James Stuart in the exhibition catalogue)