“ THE TREASURE MAP”, by XESCO MERCÉ
Due to a strange chance, which I am not trying to understand, this compilation of drawings seems to close some kind of thematic trilogy. A trilogy that like John Ford’s cavalry leaves a puzzling aftertaste behind. A mixture of a certain ingenuous epic, filled with primitive vitality, some tangential humor and despite all that, there’s also a vague flavor of narrowness of the paraffining paper of Proust´s Magdalene. There are two exhibitions preceding this one, those of my friends José Antonio Troya and Tito Inchaurralde. Each of them from their own Alice’s rearview mirror. One of them portraying our childhood commonplaces, places where we sometimes had furtive encounters, the other one depicting the bright and never-ending summer afternoons, our gangs playing with an amputated doll’s head put on the top of a stick. In a way that is how this triptych of going-back glances -which “The Treasure Map” concludes- began.

This concept close to retrospection, both from the mcguffin picked and the graphic language -plainer, close or primitive, chosen on purpose- relates “The Treasure Map”, as I said before, in a wonderful way, with both previous proposals in this space. This space where I guess my distinguished predecessors had the same feeling the setting itself becomes the real protagonist and demiurge of any image we intend to generate. The totemic presence of the mountain, such as those of Mann’s or Rossellini’s, welcomes us to wander, run and jump, around the house enjoying a just before lunch or in the early afternoon nap time. In the same way our kids make the most of it every varnishing day, while they play Indians, pirates or aliens as if they were in the Tatooine´s arid lands.
A fortunate chance - like most of them are - makes me suspect that this need of recapitulation, of looking for the answers to the first words of the question. The answers to the first daubs a baby makes while waking up, - and not only because it is shared now with other artists-fellows- all the kids who are approaching forty begin to have. In “ The Treasure Map”, the maps searching for London’s southern seas, or Kippling’s Kafiristan, the navigation across the same seas like Conrad, or along the streets (the way we do nowadays) like Cortázar, are the facts which automatically take me to my age of the innocence and are also the starting point, Bristol’s harbor of this new and strange journey.