Samborondón

Over the course of history, Saint Brendan’s Isle, the legendary island of St Brendan the Navigator who crossed the Atlantic in search of the Otherworld, has been the cause of dispute between those who believe in its existence and those who argue that it was merely a symbolic voyage. Apart from cartographic precedence and apocryphal manuscripts, the story is intertwined with the legend of Jasconius, the sea monster who appears or disappears depending on the intentions of whoever sights it.

In his first solo show at The Goma gallery, García Bello uses this voyage of discovery with the idea of fictionalizing and imagining new stories and new legends based on maritime traditions along the Atlantic coastline. In every poetic act, words are a presence in which past, present and future coexist. And something similar could be said for the visual grammar of this Galician artist. From the austere and beautiful precision of the primitive to the algorithms of artificial intelligence, García Bello gives shape to a formal and material ritualistic universe in which leather, wood, textiles and bones weave a story of ancient maritime expeditions while the anatomies of his sculptures dovetail with the geometries of seagoing vessels or with the imaginary organs of Jasconius.

The exhibition’s underlying uchronic narrative begins on the coast of Portugal and concludes on the cliffs of the Sisargas islands, bringing together, between the lines, different vernacular traditions from Ireland and Galicia. In this way, García Bello manages to embrace the whole Atlantic arc and proportion, apart from the literary value, a set of material elements proper to this particular geography and its fishing and whaling traditions. For instance, the sculptures in the series Bellow use age-old methods for making sails and seafaring attire, like dyeing with oak bark and waxing with cachalot spermaceti. There are also traces of whales in Currach, pieces borrowing their name from the traditional Irish wooden frame boat covered with animal skin. Inside we can find cotton cord like that once used for making fishing nets, also treated with plant dyes to preserve the fibres and to camouflage them when they are cast into the sea.

And just as the titles, and underlying etymologies, of some of the works lead us to imagine the mythological organs of Jasconius, the iron-acetate prints—pseudo-photographs developed using a technique favoured by the artist inspired by suminagashi, the Japanese art of marbling—invite us to explore the terrain of Saint Brendan’s Isle, described by the character João de Sousa as “having a rugged skin, like rocky granitic ochre clay,” in the notes, drawings and prints available as an appendix to the exhibition. Reality or fiction, the enigma of this phantom island that emerges or vanishes at will is directly linked with the quasi-alchemical practices activated by this Galician artist, using vernacular ingredients associated with the memory of a culture that produces its own reality in the realm of the visible, but also employing other immaterial gestures on the boundaries of the occult.