Using Radiohead’s tune Karma Police (and a text by Friedrich Nietzsche) as starting point, the artist improvises a dance on a summer day. A static camera shot, a fixed frame, his bedroom. We see Fernández dressed in white underpants and images of his personal archive. A very particular ritual of cleansing of stored memories is taking place: potential memories of the immediate surroundings in recordings that never confront each other, except for in those moments when we want to share and forget.
In the video Ensayo nº 1: sobre la creación the artist discovers in his own nakedness his inner territory, both through the dance and through the image inserts of exterior landscapes that function as feelings: a loose hose moving with the thrust of its own water spurt, a storm that fragments and advances, the sea (always the sea as longing), and a burnt car that the police is taking away. We perceive, both in the artist and in his recordings, moments of instability, moments that partake in a sort of search for the path to himself, through different facets of himself which he gradually discovers.
The artist, retired in his solitude and lost from himself, demonstrates, for one minute, his right to and strength for such an undertaking. Anxious and curious, he attempts to see what the others see by means of the flames of bonfires, of the moments of exterior tension that his personal dance comes across, in the acknowledgment of his own body, in the creative act. A ferocious self-demand, giving all that he can, albeit knowing that it’s not enough. But, as we have been able to notice in other works of his, the worst enemy that he can come across in these creations arising out of the space of intimacy, is always the artist himself.
An individual struggle for his own perfection and recognition in society, where past experiences set the pattern. A challenge, a lonely retreat, with his loving and his creating. Later, a reluctant justice will arrive. A silhouette, his own biography, which is never concluded, which is always in doubt.
“Return to your loneliness, brother, and take your tears with you. I love him who wants to create something superior to himself, and because of it, he dies.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathrustra)
