Red Light. Solo show curated by Nilo Casares.
Aula Cultural de la Caixa d'Estalvis del Mediterrani.
La Llotgeta, Valencia. Spain 2013.


Hardly anyone believes in eternal love any more. Not even the shortest and most perishable. The word love sounds corny. So relationships between men and women, including those of the same sex, are not impossible, as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan postulated, but miraculous. In the midst of the oasis of making something last, the vast wasteland of mutual incomprehension arises. And so, adrift (to follow Lyotard) the emotions float, lacking a loving narrative to contain their enormous flow.

Fernando Gimeno shows in La Llotgeta of the Obra Social de Caja Mediterráneo this emotional drift, through diffuse, languid, everyday images, collages and paper notes. All of this is arranged in the form of a sentimental journey, in which the sensation of loss dominates over the "longed for" or "indifferent" encounter. Sheets more or less dishevelled, more or less empty; corridors of white pallor; loose notes betraying a certain lack of communication (so close, so far; so close, so far) and that Red Light of the exhibition's title underlining the road to nowhere of so much frayed emotion.

The whole reveals the difficulty that exists today in finding a way out of the crisis, in this case a sentimental one. Like money, feelings have also fallen into the drift established by the exchange value as the measure of all things. Emotions have to flow, as liquids flow, to compensate for so much past solidity, so much relationship clogged up by the weariness of life together. And yet, the sentimental fluidity that Gimeno captures in Red Light, like an improvised diary, exudes a certain melancholy reflected in those eloquent crumpled sheets, in those sentences that sometimes have death as their witness, and in those naked bodies that seem inhabited by loneliness.

It is, no doubt, the sign of our times. A labile time, chained by passing instants in which no action proclaims its truth, inhabitants of a fictional universe that, as such, betrays its imposture. Fernando Gimeno stages this fragmented universe of diffuse, vague, ethereal feelings, whose dreamlike substance is, after all, what threads, with difficulty, this nightmarish journey. A Red Light that, instead of setting off all the alarms provoked by so many images and loose notes, extinguishes them by dint of the dreaming itself.

- Salva Torres for Makma magazine. Read the original review in spanish here