Jordi Fulla
Thresholds at the still point of a world that turns
I’ve always thought that somewhere inside us there’s a little nook of disorder, safeguarded from furtive glances, where are accumulated all those words that at some time we didn’t dare pronounce; the fragments of images of unresolved gazes and everything we’ve seen but never found the moment to define.
This is the thought with which my project begins, kindled by an experience of over 30 years ago. Travelling through the Catalan territory to work on the elaboration of some maps, I became struck by a series of dry-stone huts. Although I was not unfamiliar with their existence, I was surprised by their names and the mystery they exuded. Containers for memories of the landscape and the human activity deployed over centuries, the huts spoke to me softly of time, and the relation of man with his surroundings.
These dry-stone huts are, in essence, basic modular shelters, ancestral architectures that have expanded knowledge since antiquity, in the measure that farming has made its inroads throughout the territory. These constructions have needed nothing more than what was left over when preparing the fields for the crops, stones, mimetic with the physical surroundings, the human and the natural.
All this has been lying dormant in my mind, in a latent form, throughout all these years and I’ve not been able to resist seeing, beyond their function, the hut as a metaphor for an ideal space for reflection and thought. It’s that safe and distant place where the anchorite settles down to observe the world, against the light, as if it was a stone womb.
With this painterly project of indeterminate duration, what I’m interested in is penetrating the infiltration of the concept of time in the construction of the painting; for through the reiterated repetition of fragments, a timeless image ends up being constructed and maintained, one that evokes the slow and studied accumulation of stones in the construction of these unique architectures.
It’s in the fugitive instant of the creative act, when the dialogue between painting and landscape becomes magical, precisely because it’s not clear when it’s about the landscape and when it’s about painting… In that little nook of ours, without order but safeguarded from furtive gazes…That little corner that man needs as a space of reflection.
Exhibition - Thresholds at the still point of a world that turns, September 2015
