Silenci diari

Daily silence

The recent installations produced by Ester Ferrando (Reus, 1972) encourage the viewer, in an exercise of introspection, to reflect upon certain aspects of everyday life.

This work, (Daily silence, 2004) an item for domestic use, transports us to the most intimate space of our everyday life. The bathtub, where we rid ourselves of tensions, of bad feelings, nerves… where we encounter a space we make our own and non-transferable, where we feel good, floating, relaxed, allowing to the water to slide over our skin, from head to toe; freeing ourselves of the daily grind, where we can think about our concerns, where we can reflect, a silent and intimate space.

"Every day something is lost down the drain", the artist has entered in her notebook as the result of the struggle for balance between the self, time and the others. And it is through this notion of rinsing and dissolution that occurs even in intimate places, symbolically represented oversized drains, that Ferrando avoids confinement in these places of reflection and the daily silence of the act of finding one’s self becomes a metamorphosis of renewal. Because not only time and the outside world slip away, but also one’s self, which continuously fades and reconstitutes itself. This change takes shape through the transformation of everyday objects, which take on new meanings in this quasi-abstract and naked universe of simple lines, which simultaneously reinforces the transcendence of the proposed theme and the simplicity of its background. Furthermore, by paying homage to the more primary aspect of her art, Ferrando often models unique pieces that make up the entire installation, as a metaphor of her activity: taking creation to the centre of life in order to modify it or highlight the traits that interest her most.

This is how Ferrando introduces the concept of the material. The peculiar nature of her artistic language, in which abstraction and everyday life are connected, reveals with a minimalist aesthetic the small and unnoticed gestures that arouse stupefaction before the polyformism of life.