The narrative obfuscate me, the words confine me, writes Fito Conesa. Music, on the other hand, offers unsuspected cadences, tones and interior intensities that can be modulated by unconventional overlaps between image and sound, between present and past, presences and absences.
Conesa has given musical form or of instrumental composition to naval battles (Fantasy and fugue for Tsushima 2015), to suburban sunrises (Ouverture 2011), to the routine going up and down of an elevator (Chamber music 2008), to the waiting times (Waiting time, Wasting time 2009)…
He uses music to attach long distances, embody spectra, to thread intrahistory with major events … Memories or mere sensations of the artist underlie as a system of notation that each performer will perform as best suits him or her.
Lyricism, simplicity and irony have always been the best assets of Conesa. The chorus of male voices that conform Non Unisono (one of the projects awarded in Generationes 2017, Fundación Montemadrid) accuse the tonal changes, the uncontrollable “out of tune” typical of puberty.
Adolescence acquires great variety of tessituras, as many as individuals pass through it, and this piece seems to pay homage to the irreducible essence of the ages in transit.
Non unisono reminds us of another video-installation with a double screen that he realized a few years before, Un, out, less (2013) , in which the semiconscious movements of a couple falling into a light sleep were accompanied by the voices of a children’s choir, whose sounds functioned almost like onomatopoeias of the waves of pleasure, fear and tenderness that happen between the sheets.
In fact, Conesa often takes delight in the preliminaries of love or in the desire’s choreographies, without mediating words or leaving them in mute. Silenced by the interposition of a thick crystal, as in Sado (2010), where the double meaning (eastern and western) of the term leads us into a ceremony of thee filled with tension. Or in The bigger the better (2016), where he recovers a scene from the homonymous movie of porn cinema to focus on the preambles of a sexual conquest. In both cases he practices linguistic and formal switchs: from Zen to Sade, and from porno to nouvelle vague.
He has danced his last waltz with Felix González-Torres, to the compass of some notes that even if we know nothing about reading musical scores we imagine emotionally charged, because they adapt the beautiful words with which the Cuban artist synthesized as artistic epitaph his desire to arouse empathy: above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful.
The fragmentary arrangement of the musical stave, as a puzzle, impels us to recompose the tesserae in our inner self, to musicalize according to our personal background the sublime simplicity of that statement able to be buried (in waltz tempo) in the bottom of shared feelings about art, creation, the need to leave a mark, love and loss.
But is in his most recent project, which now will be presented in Espai Tactel, where culminate some interests that has been reiterating in his work: “Train Phase”, the static harmony that he dedicates to Steve Reich. In this piece he weaves with sonic thread dense warps between statistical data and intercity transit, memory and thought, biography and micropolitics, travel and introspection.
He shares with the minimalist musician and his “Different Trains” the will to experiment with the translation of small stories to melodies, to mix voices and echoes, times and spaces, to extract precious gems practicing sound archeology.
The recording of the pieces on vinyl adds another layer of value, sedimenting the ethereal in an iconic support, chest of transpersonal memorabilia.
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Current exhibition: “Train Phase, Armonía estática para Steve Reich”
in Espai Tactel, Valencia
From 10-03-2017 to 28-04-2017
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