For more than ten years Carlos Fernández-Pello has been experimenting with the limits of professional identity, under the suspicion that this is where much of the Western trauma resides. Blurring the boundaries between text, image, work and creativity, his process resembles the fermentation of a cheese, where decomposition and life acquire a joint and inarticulate flavor.

Based on his experiments in the family village (Vilar de Cas, Lugo) and his collaboration with the artisan Carlos Reija, the artist has brought together on this occasion a series of xarros and panels made with Galician cheese, contrasting them with a series of small rationalist paintings that seem to address the tension between the time of work and the time of curing.

We find ourselves in the first place with an exploration of the centennial heritage of the oleiros, in the form of vases and dysfunctional containers with which Fernández-Pello seems to want to rehearse a new ritual of protection. Through them, the artist questions the role of institutions and the figure of the curator, who, in his opinion, sometimes act as great xarras meigas, tricking the flows of poetic production in favor of political discourse and presenting the artist as a servant. This ambitious material incantation is extended to a collection of five small-format paintings, made in collaboration with natural milk bacteria and curated over the last two years with hardly any mediation from the artist. A gesture that not only humorously repeats the administrative function of any curator, but also questions the maxim of conservation of the work of art, by elevating the texture and color of decomposition to the center of the pictorial image.

In the same direction, but with an absolutely opposite materiality, the artist completes the exhibition with a series of paper scores that seem to introduce yet another indecipherable enigma. In these “excel paintings” Fernández-Pello revises the spreadsheets he uses daily in the office to paint them by hand afterwards, erasing each of their cells and accentuating the rhythm and the anodyne beauty that underlies administrative work. A tiny and routine palette, made with tedious brushstrokes, and which serves as a metaphor for his own healing as a poet; removed from the mundane noise of art; hidden at the bottom of the cellar of salaried work.

Someone will understand us when we are dead suggests that we only manage to understand the meaning of a poem long after it has died in our mouth. The anachronistic experience that Fernández-Pello proposes not only questions the bureaucratic anxiety of the institutions, who have understood their curatorial work in a prescriptive, restless way, without pause or possible regeneration. He also proposes a resistance of the poem as a waiting in the face of the nervous inertia of art to professionalize and understand everything, now, now and immediately. Far from the tragic epic and the cult of the martyrs of art, so fashionable in our last century, understanding the dead from the making of cheese means honoring them with the acts of our conscious life: biting and chewing, very slowly, the magic that dwells in each unproductive moment.