TAGO-MAGO

Magdalena Abele, Malte Bruns, Jan Erbelding, Paloma G. Dotor, Changje Hong, Johannes Kersting, Wataru Murakami, Kilian Ochs, Ria Patricia Röder, Josha Steffens, Jyrgen Ueberschär and Jasmin Werner.
Professor: Elger Esser

Galería Fúcares is proud to present the art project that Elger Esser, with their students from Hochschule für Gestaltung de Karlsruhe, based on a journey through the vastness of Castilla-La Mancha.
The gaze towards the East, at dawn, carried us in our first trip to Venice. In the second trip that we made last year to Spain, the gaze towards the West, towards dusk – at least from our viewpoint – accompanied us. This time it was not just the wealth of past ages and their cultural heritage which directed our sight, but untouched Nature, the space of the plain, the strong and blazing light, the varied ochre and red tones of Castilla-La Mancha: the land of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. We met something new, a strange silent emptiness that in artistic work demands developing a personal gaze.
The young artists featured in this catalogue present some works in which successful results can be appreciated. In the course of their studies, each has developed their own method and a particular gaze. This is a heterogeneous exhibition – each work reveals a personal gaze that transforms topics of scarce interest into results of major import.
Photography feeds from reality, but the gaze surpasses reality itself. Knowledge feeds our gaze, and excessive reflection prevents it from developing. Our method was searching in the ample emptiness of the landscape. Don Quixote, the first mystic symbolist of literature has led us. He has pointed the way through hilarious absurdity as a transition to Luis Buñuel’s transcendent surrealism.
Although it is not an aspect of my personal work, I have lived this particular surrealist feel that emerges from this landscape – in a small village that, according to our current society, should not exist anymore, forgotten since it cannot be found in any map. Nevertheless, the village exists in the distance and in the surroundings of Cuenca, in a ruined chapel, in a few houses and stables. There an old man approaches and starts to talk about television, and I talk to him about photography. I was looking for an image, and he was looking for his goat. I saw it, but he answered that he was looking for another one. I talked to him about a landscape, and he talked to me about his village (which should not exist anymore). ‘Are you the last inhabitant?’ ‘No, there are two of us.’ We talk about poverty and wealth, about dictatorship and freedom, about youth and old age. And there we met, he in his village and me in my landscape. I asked him about his wife. ‘No, I don’t have a wife. I have two goats, three horses and five hens.’ Not knowing what else to say, I said that I am a teacher. ‘Yes, me too’, he answered, ‘I taught my goat to walk on her knees.’ Suddenly, I realised the ample space of the plain and the strong and blazing light, and I noticed the smell of the dry soil. I fell silent and for an instant I saw him in my landscape and myself in his village that should not exist anymore.

Elger Esser