'Nutrir la esteem', created by the artist Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada together with the members of the Crisálida Foundation
At ground level it is sometimes difficult to distinguish a work of art made of wheat of a poorly plowed field. At ground level, sometimes we are so blind that everything seems the same. You think that compost is just rubbish or that if a person is different it will be because they don't look like you, but it is very likely that in both cases you are wrong and that if you walk away you end up realizing that you really had no idea about anything. Almost nothing is just a single thing. Almost everything has its reason. Beauty is almost never just what we are told beauty is. Sometimes you have to reprimand to look.
This is the case with land art, a current of contemporary art that uses the materials found in the middle of nature to create a hybrid between architecture, landscape and sculpture. Experiencing it requires another perspective. It demands being and living the work. And so it happens more than once in our own biography, when we have to rise up and take a distance to distinguish what is before our eyes and not stereotype it.
The canvas chosen for the work has been a wheat field
With these elements in mind the Crisalida Foundation of Huesca, dedicated to the integration of people with intellectual disabilities, the artist of Cuban origin asked Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada, known for his murals and for great interventions carried out in public space, which he created a work of art in the rural area of Estopiñán del Castillo and he offered them Nourish esteem.
On the ground (bird's eye view), Nurturing Esteem represents a pair of hands (a small child hand and an adult hand) that are about to come together. The hands, for the artist, are tools that facilitate and sustain life. They are a symbol of creative power, of the balance between giving and taking and of the potential of everything that we can manifest through action and work.
But in addition, with these hands, Rodríguez-Gerada pays homage to the work carried out by the members of Fundación Crisálida, since Iris, Aleix, Martí, Cristina, Álex, David, Jacinto, Carina, Caroline, Jennifer, Esmeralda, Ana, Milla and Alén knead the bread, cakes, muffins and cookies with their own hands every day who feed the inhabitants of their village.
Hands, for the artist, are tools that facilitate and sustain life
In Nourish esteem, whose "living pigments" are the colors of ripening wheat and peat, They participated as much as their families and the townspeople who wanted to join.
By its very nature, the work is ephemeral and is in constant transformation. In fact, its end will come in October 2021, when the wheat is harvested, it becomes flour and the members of the Crisálida Foundation knead bread with it.
With this act of collective creation, explains the Cuban artist on his website, they want celebrate the value of horizontal relationships, recognize the individual contribution to the good of the community and glimpse all that we can achieve when we join forces to concretize ideas that can only be carried out if we form a team.
The metamorphosis of the work will be recorded on video and photographed by the artist Ana Alvarez-Errecalde, she known for her work on childbirth and caregiving.