Fotokino

Be careful, open your eyes, it’s all going to happen very quickly. There, it’s already gone. We warned you! Isidro Ferrer opened his magician’s suitcase, took out a few pieces of wood and scrap metal, and fooled your eyes with one of his visual tricks. Before visual arts, he was passionate about performing arts, and nobody will doubt that. Isidro Ferrer pursues what theatre could offer on a human scale through his miniature sets and tiny actors in painted costumes.

Like many autodidacts of his kind, he moves intuitively through the world, curious about everything, and constructs his own culture through a gargantuan appetite. The freedom of his expression, from graphic design to publishing, through drawing or staging, relates him to this family of artists, from Calder to Joan Brossa, who developed with delight a multifaceted body of work.

Worn objects, a texture, traces, a shadow… his compositions are made out of very little, but are rich in imaginative outlets. It is this kind of magic that Isidro constantly plays with, a pair of scissors in one hand, a piece of wood in the other, and a brush between his teeth. Forks, coffee cups, houses, corkscrews, tree leaves… Ferrer’s vocabulary is composed objects as phonemes that express everyday life in its most familiar form, and to divert them from their primary use, or from their original form, is like stating straight away that reality is here toppling over into the world of dreams and poetry.

Either in the wooden figures created for this exhibition, or in the arrangements made for the Cahier de vacances, we can feel in every detail a playful hand and a healthy heart, open to the spinning forces of life: friendship, love, death, sadness and joy. His images speak to us in this way, going beyond the alluring aspects of design or illustration, in order to strive for emotion and reflection.