
Gallery Facade. April 2022.

Gallery Facade. April 2022.

Gallery Facade. April 2022.

Exhibition view. Void 4

Exhibition view. Void 4

Exhibition view.

Company.

Company.

Company.

Exhibition view.

Exhibition view. Void 3.

Exhibition view. Void 1 y Void 3.

Exhibition view.

Exhibition view. Void 1.

Voids. Detail.

Voids. Detail.

Exhibition view.

Venom.

Venom.

Venom. Detail.

Exhibition view. The Apartment.

Exhibition view. The Apartment.

Exhibition view. The Apartment.

Exhibition view. The Apartment.

Exhibition view. The Apartment.

Exhibition view. The Apartment. Detail.

Exhibition view. The Apartment. Detail.

Exhibition view. The Apartment. Detail.

Exhibition view.

Exhibition view.

Exhibition view.
Information
FERMÍN JIMÉNEZ LANDA
A pocket without a hand is a cloth, a table without bread is a board.
From April 2 to May 28, 2022 Galeria MPA / Moisés Pérez de Albéniz is pleased to present Fermín Jiménez Landa’s first exhibItion at the gallery, titled A pocket without a hand is a cloth, a table without bread is a board.
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A pocket without a hand is a cloth, a table without bread is a table, is a deformed and stretched statement of a Russian saying that I found written in German and is also the title of this exhibition. The exhibition displays works in which games of full and empty plot experiences and experiments, situations that happened, and others that will develop during the exhibition. Working with the void as the common root of the term empty (vacuus) and concepts such as vague, vacation, and vagabond. We explore the void that exists between Jorge Oteiza’s works by filling the space with housing insulation, molds of every corner of an emptied apartment in a neighborhood of Valencia, and pieces of bread made with dough molded in the pockets of my pants during several walks, as well as an outdoor light bulb that lights up when opening the fridge of the gallery, a microscopic amount of snake venom, or an intervention in the pockets of the gallery staff. Issues that have excited me in recent years appear in this accumulation of works more directly or indirectly: walking, traversing space and passing through time, uselessness and resistance to productivity, leisure, play, an idea of free time, the insignificant and the anti-monumental.
A light / Una luz
A light comes on in the façade when the door of the gallery’s refrigerator opens. It announces something as absolutely normal as the moment a gallery worker picks up a sandwich or a bottle of water.
The end of one void is the beginning of another / El final de un vacío es el principio de otro
I consider emptiness as a working material, but not the one generated between the parts of an Oteiza sculpture, as the artist intended, but the emptiness created between two of his sculptures. This implies poetically active spaces, so to speak, of 50 cm x 2 m, but also shapes of 50 cm x 7,000 km. It is a kind of delirious working principle that leads me to relate the void to elements more akin to my work such as walking, cartography, the provocation of situations, and narrative. Several pieces made with housing insulation, a material designed to fill gaps, reproduce the exact void between several voids permanently installed in the Oteiza Museum.
The apartment / El apartamento
Some time ago, we rented an apartment a few streets away from a museum (CCCC in Valencia), and we emptied it, reversing the roles of the museum and the apartment. The apartment was almost a white cube, but with traces of absent furniture and dust balls, and the museum was barely a storage room. No one knew the address of the apartment because they were guided blindfolded. From every corner of the house, we took a plaster mold. A panegyric to the place where lint is forgotten, to the shape of the house, to the minuscule scale routes in private spaces.
Company / Compaña
They are molds of my pants pockets made with bread dough that has been taking shape during walks. At the end of a walk, I bake the result. They make visible an invisible part of almost our bodies, a dark and very personal zone. Here the emptiness has a link to something Carpanta with that proximity between empty pockets and empty stomachs, between physical hunger and economy, a few centimeters away. They are installed in pairs at the height of my pockets.
Poison / Veneno
A working level with signs of years of use rests discreetly in a corner creating doubts as to whether its presence is an oversight by the installers or not. But the liquid that gives the instrument its usefulness, with its bubble that positions us spatially to the world, has been replaced by snake venom. A minimal but highly toxic fluid for a body.
Staircase / Escaleras
In another inverted role, in the gallery where there are usually more daring installations due to the nature of the space, we find a set of two-dimensional works more usual for a gallery but installed in a somewhat uncomfortable way for the visitor.
Breadcrumbs / Migas de pan
Galería MPA and Juan Silió share the number twenty of Dr. Fourquet Street in a wonderful cadastral error. On April 2nd they open at the same time as my exhibition and theirs, in which Marta and Cristina have invited me to participate as well, so I exhibit individually and collectively at the same time. In a sort of ping-pong of paths, I propose a line of breadcrumbs that leads from number twenty to number twenty, so as not to get lost. The last intervention that I narrate happens in the pockets of the gallery team, who will carry during the time of the exhibition some breadcrumbs in their pockets, in an almost indemonstrable way.