A Galician sailor reports a strange apparition occurring while sailing in a vessel across the North Sea: the Shetland Islands appear to be floating in the air. The “fata morgana” occurs when there is an alteration in the temperature over the sea, which inverts the usual perception of the landscape, causing us to see mirages. Our visual system has its glitches and also its limitations in terms of being able to discern and make sense of tiny perceptions, such as the changing position of the petals of a flower. How can their movements be captured?
Painting is the malleable medium par excellence that allows us to explore the ambiguity of images and their relationship with our identity. Flowers have been a constant trope in art and culture since before they became the obsession of 17th Century Dutch painters or impressionists. Thinking through flowers brings us back to concepts such as beauty, desire or mourning, while at the same time establishing a dialogue with our habitat.
To speak about the abstraction of forms in Jorge Galindo’s canvases would mean reducing his language to design, line or colour. However, by emphasising process, there is room for joy, for a figure, for pictorial space. Movements, not states. A potential growth and not a finality. “Fata Morgana” presents works from two different series, made in different periods of time, but both based on images of flowers on postcards from the end of the century, altered with colours that accentuate the folds, lines and tones of what they represent. It is also significant to mention the origin of the paper on which the “Braille Flowers” are executed, as it comes from small notebooks that an ONCE1 venue in Madrid discarded in the rubbish in the 1980s, which Galindo collected and transformed, at that time, into his first treatises on how to paint. Sketches, outlines and colour charts now transformed into dancing flowers. The material is a nod towards to the subtle language of Braille and draws a parallel with that of painting, a return to the “language before language”, in the artist’s words.
