If
Theologus esse volebam: diu angebar:
Deus ecce mea opera etiam in astronomia celebratur.
Before science and religion were clearly delineated, it was believed that the movement of celestial bodies is governed by divine laws. In 1596, after having abandoned the study of theology, astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler published a book titled The Secret of the World or Mysterium Cosmographicum, hoping it would be read as a precursor to cosmological essays for discovering the secrets of the universe. Years later, Kepler was forced to discard his original model of regular polyhedra and the harmony of spheres. Despite his initial conviction, he realised that God did not create planets moving along perfect geometrical paths, but rather planets moving in elliptical orbits. It was on the basis of this realisation that he could write the three laws of planetary motion that redefined human understanding of the universe.
Miguel Ángel Férnandez’ artistic trajectory could be described as a constant search for a harmonious conjunction of two planets that are obviously diametrically opposed in many ways: art and life. In this experimental research exercise, the work itself is transformed into a new element of our personal constellation, which is subject to the laws and principles of our existence. The artist creates plastic performative situations in which different everyday objects and ordinary materials are subject to the causality of chance with unpredictable results creating a new reality, which is completely different from the previous one, but still as perfect as it is original.
This time, the artistic intervention is presented as a timeless situation in which the performative act seems hopelessly doomed to fail. The ethereal prints of the common European currency, which dissolve in space, and the reciting of the artist’s distorted story in an unknown language serve as the paratextual elements whose intention is to increase the possibility of perceiving, even if by accident, the purposefulness of the act. The text here works like an ellipsis. The message is not in the transmission, but rather in the gesture; the conditioning of our perception of reality as an element limited to a global constellation, which works in agreement with absolute economic and political laws and principles, and the potential of art as a liberating power, insofar as it emerges in connection with an attitude that does not take into account boundaries accepted without grounds.
At the time when astrologers were considered the new philosophers, the discussion about the impact of planetary movement on human behaviour foregrounded, again, the debates about historical astrology as a means of interpreting our existence and its most important events under the forces ruling the universe. Under the influence of this idea, the artist connects with the humanist spirit in order to show the implicit acceptance of causality and the determinist perception of reality as something inevitable for mankind, and to highlight the potential of art to counter the inherent fatalism of our existential doubts.