Cañaveral [Reed bed] is the proposal by Fernando García for Intertextual. García starts with 249 Litros, the installation which opened the space back in January, and takes a look at some of the most characteristic features of Carlos Maciá’s intervention. The almost complete occupation of the space, the dominating horizontality, the power of colour, the matt finish and texture of the huge volume which closed off the Anexo gallery space are now features García uses in order to set up a dialogue in this penultimate proposal for the Intertextual series.

Fernando García’s proposal arose during his artistic residency in Canada from January to June 2015 where he began collecting dollar coins without any specific intention. Once returning from the trip the coins became foreign items brought from abroad, i.e. evidence of García’s journey and of the collection process itself. The coins are now inserted into the slits carved into bamboo reeds he came across during a trip to El Puerto de Santa María. The bamboo has become a key element in the present installation. At the same time García establishes a relationship between the interior and exterior of the Anexo through a series of photographs taken in Galicia during his visit to MARCO in November 2014 and which are mounted in frames made from granite.

In Fernando García there is a defining interest in working with materials, in the process and in the encounter between all of the different parts which constitute the work of art. Cañaveral brings together the need to actively participate in each of the steps which conforms the work, and the expectation with regard to how each of the selected materials behaves as part of a whole and separately. In this sense, the care taken while cutting into the bamboo reeds is united with the insertion of the coins and the doubt which is prolonged until the union takes place. The same thing occurs between the photographs and the granite, which in this case speak about the immediate surroundings, the museum’s architecture, and about what is behind the museum walls. The union implies in both cases not only the joining of two materials, the relationship between which is for Fernando Garcia unknown, but also the role of time operating in each action throughout the entire process. 

An encounter is then produced between the initial horizontality and the verticality of the bamboo reeds, the intense color used by Carlos Maciá as opposed to the coldness in Garcia’s proposal, the matt finish opposed to the shiny finish of the coins or the bamboo itself which takes as a reference the space which was occupied before, generating and inserting a spatial memory inside those limits.

Just as he has done in previous work, Fernando García pays special attention to what has occurred before in the space where he is working, he pays special attention to travel and to the conditions in which each art work is made. In this case the trip to Galicia does not go unnoticed, nor does the material which composes the structure of the museum, or any of the materials which he has used over the last few months.