I am walking in town, deliberately choosing side streets and places I normally won't go to by force of habit.
It is a fine autumn day, sunny but cold under the blue-white Parisian sky and sublimated by the clear light that follows rainy days.
On the gallery wall, an installation of small paintings in different formats crowded all together and yet harmonic. White sculptures on the other wall.
They tell a story and remind me of the memories of an old person put up on the walls of an empty and silent living room.
I go inside to look better and I discover the "Vanishing Point" Installation by young Spanish Artist Federico Granell.
I like the intimate scale of the setting on the gallery walls as in the paintings themselves.
Deserted places with a human figure, a young man turning his back on us while looking at the emptiness around him.
But this desert, declined in different forms and media (paintings and sculptures), is a resonating, inhabited one.
These places once alive want to tell a story, if we only listen next to the silent alter-ego of the artist in them.
A story of loss but hope, a tale about time that evaporates at different speeds from places and people alike but not before teaching us how precious yet transient our life is.
They tell a tale of personal and historical decline but also of a story that continues, of us belonging to them, to everybody that preceeded us and made us who we are.
A long personal and historical line and we are just a point in it.
Panta rei, everything moves, all is fluid and in the sad, deserted places of Federico Granell's work at another time people lived and loved and danced and were happy.
I think the artist is looking at them and me with him.
Go see time and space in movement in an intimate, modest setting that talks about love and loss, death and hope and belonging.
Links:
Gallery
Federico Granell
Open now until the 17th of Octomber, 2015
