ENTRANCE TO AN EXHIBITION (ENTRADA A UNA EXPOSICIÓN, 1990/2018)
Esther Ferrer describes the nature and purpose of Entrada a una exposición as follows:
Life is shrouded in the skin, which is a human being’s first clothing, the frontier between two worlds, and, as Paul Valéry wrote, “the deepest thing in man”, but at the same time the most superficial, a word that comes from the Latin “superficies”, based in its turn on “facies”, a face. The skin is therefore like the surface of a mirror that reflects the depth of which the poet speaks.
Subject of love or aggression, memory, bearer of ritual or object of discrimination, the skin is also a sometimes unyielding source of information about our physical and emotional condition. Above all, however, the skin is the gateway to our sensations owing to its interaction with the nervous system, which transmits them to the brain.
The installation titled Entrance to an exhibition tries to raise everyone’s awareness of their own skin through contact with an external element, in this case the sensuality of feathers. The work is designed to arouse sensations, stimulate the viewer’s receptiveness, and increase his or her perceptive capacity by creating a state of pleasurable “alert”, a preparatory stimulus for the visit to the rest of the exhibition. “It’s a matter of feeling, not thinking; the rest of the exhibition is there for that.
Ferrer wants to make a clear distinction between the sensory experience delivered by the installation and the type of experience in the rest of the exhibition. What she shows next is dominated by sobriety, minimal materiality, and abstract concepts or ideas, such as the mathematical graphics underlying her Spatial Projects (Proyectos espaciales).