Page 64 - C-Faces 2003

FRACTAL IDEAS CONCERNING THE ART OF FERMÍN MORENO
Fernando Castro Flórez

We are currently experiencing in art what Michael exceptional complexity and, occasionally, wefts
Fried recently called theatrality 1, something he that bring camouflage fabrics to mind. It is not just
defined as a general drift towards situations of a question of the simple cloning of forms; what
impurity which, at least as far as painting is we see is a rapid metastasis utterly devoid of
concerned, lead to deviations from modernist tragedy. Surprisingly perhaps, what we find is a
orthodoxy. While collage (or DIY) remains the kind of playfulness (even in a work like Komala,
benchmark procedure, the dividing lines between presented at the Young Art Show 2000, which
genres are gradually and visibly dissolving; the consists of a phosphorescent skull acting as a
confines of painting are undergoing an expansion metaphor of a territory where the living and the
in which influences from photography and dead coexist). Figures may well appear in the
installation are becoming extremely important. midst of his abstract spaces2: there are stunned-
Fermín Moreno is a perfect example of the painter eyed cats, glossy pistols or chairs in an empty
who breaks down the traditional limits of his genre room, and videos or luminous links in a remarkably
to create works that take on board the processes affecting superposition. His recent paintings are
of redefined abstraction while also assimilating marked by a particularly striking sense of
cybernetic developments into the compositional architecture, with differently coloured geometric
mode. For his show at Bilbao’ s Sala Rekalde blocks or pieces accumulating to awake in the
gallery in 2000, Moreno had two awnings inscribed viewer a paradoxical sensation of immobility allied
with plotted adhesive vinyl and a huge mural in with unceasing motion.
which he combined the elements of what he sees
as a kind of alphabet; placed close to these images Moreno’s paintings are executed as process3, in
were six chairs, three light boxes with forms linked line with what has been defined as redefined
to what had settled ‘pictorially’ and a computer abstraction4, where odd geometries are mixed
with a reprogrammed fight game. Despite entering with figurative fragments or texts (or, better still,
into a curious dialogue with the work of Iñaki Saez, writing that does not aspire to meaning). Richter
ultimately Moreno’s work reflected his concern is one of the artists most determined to break the
with using the resources of digital culture to expand supposed contradiction between abstraction and
and extend the idiom of painting. As opposed to figuration, being concerned particularly that the
rigid, straight-laced or funereal (and, it should be image should impact or be capable of creating an
noted, intrinsically clichéd) approaches to the emotional climate, in situations ranging from
practice of painting, it became clear that, in a post- nostalgia to hope: “nostalgia for some lost quality,
narrative situation (i.e., beyond the stories, myths for a better world, for what would be the opposite
and tales that tended to cement social links), of hopelessness and lack of prospects. [...] One
artistic potential is multiple. Certainly, a tendency could also talk of redemption. Or of hope, the
towards hybridisation reveals a certain hope that painting might, despite everything,
understanding and presence of the zeitgeist. produce an impact.”5 Moreno’s artworks certainly
Fermín Moreno calls ‘the mystique of gesture’ have an impact; thankfully, the vibrant colours,
very much into question, generating his images the almost choreographic fluency of the forms
in a process (he has talked of “procedural and the generally playful tone keep them free
feedback” between the computer and painting) from pretentiousness. Moreno fearlessly takes
that evolves into fractalization: structures of his imagination into the arbitrary and the chaotic,
repetition and superposition produce an although later he ‘cools off’ what he has painted,

1 Cf. Michael Fried: “Arte y objetualidad” in Minimal Art, Sala Koldo Mitxelena, San Sebastián, 1996, p. 73.
2 Explaining his work in Situaciones (2001), Moreno notes that what he tries to do is to shed light publicly “on the way my works are

generated, and on the relationships created between them during the formalisation process. So parameters such as abstraction and
figuration are intimately linked, and are intended to be understood as a global work.”
3 “ Fermín’s work is always in processes, where time does its work, while cooling emotions off to endow them with meaning. These
processes sometimes lead to images, textures, structures... and I guess now –perhaps always– to situations” (Alberto Lomas:
“Procesos complejos-intentos de sentido” in Fermín Moreno. Amateur, Bilbao Arte, 1999). (Alberto Lomas: “Complex processes-
attempts at meaning” in Fermín Moreno. Amateur).
4 Cf. Demetrio Paparoni: “La abstracción redefinida” in Nuevas abstracciones, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid,
1996, pp. 24-31.
5 Gerhard Richter, in conversation with Benjamín H.D. Buchloh in Gerhard Richter, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid,
1994, p. 40.
6 John Berger: “¿Cómo aparecen las cosas?, o Carta abierta a Marisa” in El Bodegón, Ed. Galaxia Gutenberg, Círculo de Lectores,
Madrid, 2000, p. 70. (John Berger: How do things appear? or Open letter to Marisa” in The Still-Life.)

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