The Grid series of paintings has its origin in the growing interest that memory and the mechanisms involved in it have acquired in my creative output in recent years. My work was already centred on the perception of reality and the reworking of it in which we are constantly engaged. However, since the loss of a very close friend three years ago, this focus has gradually shifted towards memory and recollection as a particular and extreme case of that constant construction of reality.
The Grid series is thus an in-depth hybridization of painting and photography, a constant in my work. This back and forth between photography and painting as strategies for interpreting reality allows me to talk about the mechanisms that intervene in our perception and in the construction of our memory.
In this particular case, the series had its origin in an image strongly linked to my memory and my personal recollections: a photograph of the tree (a false pepper tree, Schinus molle) that we planted on the ashes of my dead friend. The tree stands on a piece of land on the outskirts of Córdoba (in Encinarejo) where we used to spend summers together during our childhood and adolescence. Thus, the photographic image that engenders the series is loaded with memories and recollections on account of everything it stands for in my personal history. Starting from a highly charged image such as this, I was interested in investigating the mechanisms by which our memory constantly reinterprets that image to which we seek to refer. The objective of the series is, in a way, to map the distance between reality and the recollection we construct of this reality after it is gone.
Although in this case I use strictly visual strategies to chart that distance and explore that trace, the mechanisms of memory are synaesthetic and smell is one of the most important triggers of memory. I am especially interested in how our memory is constructed from fragments which are reorganized and become more important as time passes. In the development of this series, starting from such a highly charged image, my memory was seething with fragments, recollections, smells and sensations of those shared experiences and that summer setting next to the Guadalquivir in which we lived so many of the things that today remain in our memory and in that false pepper tree under which I like to sit and listen, smell and remember whenever I can.
Interestingly enough, the Schinus molle (also known as Peruvian Lentisco) is a perennial tree which produces a very fragrant resin greatly appreciated in pre-Hispanic and Andean cultures. The resin in its trunk and leaves and its pink pepper fruit were used to produce a great variety of things, from a traditional yellow dye to honey and liquor. It was also widely used in traditional medicine for its pesticidal properties. The resin and the ashes of the burnt leaves were used to embalm the dead in Andean cultures.

Fernando M. Romero