UNTITLED LANDSCAPES FOR A WORLD WITH NO NAME

Iván de la Nuez. Essayist, art critic and curator.

The advent of photography had an irreversible impact on the narration of the world. It simultaneously threw painting and literature into crisis, shaking their narratives of reality and triggering legal consequences that are worth recalling every now and then.

There was a time, now almost forgotten, when the owners of buildings also held the right of representation. As owners of the perimeter, they had the power to prohibit photographing them. They simply acted as lords and masters of the landscape.

In his essay The Ecstasy of Influence, the American novelist Jonathan Lethem reflects on the moment when photography managed to cross this barrier. The exact point in time when the law allowed photography to intervene on walls and people. The instant in which the law decided to go “in favor of the pirates” for the first time.

“Was the photographer stealing from the person or building whose photograph he shot?”

This is the question that Lethem asks himself.

As a result of this legal change, something became everyone’s property, a liberated space in which we had the possibility to begin to intervene without paying any tolls or asking for permission.

It is within this conquered freedom that Adrián Fernández’s work lies. Right on the horizon “where a cat can look at a king.”

His work is marked by the attraction of spaces; by the magnetism that better or more advanced worlds, or simply different ones, exert on us.

Plato’s Republic had a similar sweeping capacity: a model of a city-state always ready to welcome us as the capital of understanding, merit and justice. Or Moro’s Utopia, a kind of futuristic flock guided by a stern king where all the pieces fit together. Or Campanella’s City of the Sun, a territory structured somewhere between proto-communism and a hippie commune, where dialogue operated as a guarantor of love and harmony. Or (reinterpreting Orwell) Terry Gilliam’s dystopian Brazil. Or The Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Or the community, upriver, that captivates the protagonist in Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos. Or the final confine that Fitzcarraldo rushes to in order to build the ideal opera house for Enrico Caruso to sing in. Or the black holes, the whirlwinds, the eyes of hurricanes, the craters of volcanoes, all inviting us to descend into the center of the Earth. Or Mars and the Moon urging us to go out beyond them...

Like the ones by Adrián Fernández, these scenes fulfilled the paradox of functioning as out-of-place landscapes. And in all of them, beneath their idyllic image, the magnetism of darkness could be felt.

In either case, these landscapes compel us to abandon the human scale of our immediate space to finally become involved in an expedition that surpasses that measure, certifying that there is no point in dissenting from history if we do not also dissent from geography.

As if faced with the unfeasibility of improving this world, the illusion of another hidden world, unheard of and beyond the one we already know, was bubbling inside.

As if that other world were possible, but only because we are not in this one.

Hence, the recovery of situationism entrenched in the city (according to Lefebvre) and minimalism spread out through the countryside (according to Rosalind Krauss). The abduction of the desert, as described by Borges, and destiny. Ubiquity and the most inevitable of all attractions: the law of gravity.

And Tatlin and the Russian avant-garde and Italian futurism and pop art and postmodernism.

All these movements invaded the landscape to change it. That is, to turn it into another landscape.

It was put at art’s disposal so that the latter could boycott it ruthlessly. Perhaps because that is precisely the nature of art: to perform an act of violence on the world’s surface. The very world that Paul Virilio perceived as a museum of all its evils (contrary to the well-established modern tradition that portrays museums as executors of all its possessions).

It is through this crevice that Adrián Fernández penetrates the landscape—without shying away, where necessary, from the theatricality required by his incursion or the portable setting required by this undertaking, whose ultimate purpose is not to create a new fiction, but a new reality.

Persuaded, perhaps, by the fact that burrowing into the oppressive condition of the landscape is a fertile way to unveil its truths. And that, for this enterprise, it is better to act through confrontation rather than through agreement; through destruction rather than through deconstruction.

Here then the pieces navigate between Tatlin and Le Corbusier, Philip Johnson’s high tech and Blade Runner, Andrei Tarkovsky and George Orwell, the beautiful and the sinister, as theorized by Freud.

There is a fierce struggle here against the ideological animism of those totalitarian societies, fascinated by their statues.

There is a plan here...

And this plan is none other than that of a methodical art that persists in its purpose of planting a landscape. Much like a farmer plants a tree, like the police plants false evidence, like espionage plants a mole in enemy territory.

In these works, the landscape struggles to shake off “all things natural.” To remove totems from one place and set them in another. To exalt new gods on the altar when it is essential to disrupt the boredom of the Olympus.

There is no moralizing or rhetoric in this violence—just pure, straightforward storytelling that follows Jenny Holzer’s advice: “Description is more valuable than metaphor.”

So, as impressive as these sites may be, it is not so much The Story that matters, but rather the individual stories in them. The loose pieces from a puzzle that we already know we will never finish putting together.

Moreover, a labyrinth with several exits has been built here.

It could lead to open fields or to the seashore.

To Havana’s Malecon or to any desert in the world. These are all places that require the burdensome job of building monuments precisely in times dedicated to tearing them down. Together with Adrián Fernández we move through statues that are actually models of future sculptures. Props for ephemeral scenographies. Puzzles. Tools. Ruins. Laboratory tests with the impossible mission of finding a formula that will stop time.

They are also models ready to be photographed and thereby move, frozen and timeless, from one medium to another. Configuring, ultimately, a trans-objective horizon that serves sometimes as a bridge and sometimes as an unprecedented launching pad.

In either format, Adrián Fernández sets out to perform an invasive maneuver—that of undertaking, against the landscape, acts that have no name. And like most of the pieces in his series, they have no title.

For his invention of this landscape to work, the location must dominate the relocation, just like
the future must dominate the present.

Only then will we have a place in these impossible structures. In these Babylonian artifacts that, like Ur, the primeval city, or Las Vegas, the postmodern city, seem to have sprung up all of a sudden.

Only in this way will we connect with these buildings whose surroundings seem to have been designed according to an uninhabited city. To the end of the boundaries between photography, art and architecture. To the transparency of structures consisting exclusively of scaffolding that can only support empty spaces. To the enigma of shadows with no corporeal reference in sight. To the backside of billboards where politics once nestled. To the pending memories that we will not unravel in the past, but in some bend in the future. To the monuments that are not dedicated to superheroes, but to an incomplete man. To the wooden sculpture that has its own embedded saw warning itself of its upcoming demolition.

Only in this way, from this understanding, will we be able to deal with these snippets of the time that is to come. With the fragments of this future that is the figment of imagination and, at the same time, of the obstinate conviction that the best art is always a poisoned gift.

This is why these pieces refer to the Trojan Horse and Russian matryoshkas, to Molotov cocktails and poisons strategically dissolved in banquets. To bombs set off within the present (in its dual condition of historical time and gift).

Only then, from the inner offering that inhabits each of these works, all our certainties and all our landscapes will be ready to blast into the air.