Esther Ernst
27.03. - 08.05. 2010
Vernissage: 27.03. 17 - 19.30
Guillermo Martin Bermejo, "Rauchfuge"
28.05.- 26.06. 2010
Vernissage: 14.05. 17 - 19.30
If we had to describe the changes in our modern society today, one of them would be the loss of smoke.
The chimneys in the houses, factories or railways don’t belch smoke anymore. It’s no longer allowed to smoke in any public area. London has no fog.
With that loss, the western world is losing what that smoke brought: the mystery, the mists, a certain dark and decadent culture. Bohemian intrigues, love stories without future, vampires in smoking jackets, a certain operetta eroticism, houses with gaslights... Behind those scenarios, characters like Klaus Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the dark and beautiful Jakob Wassermann, René Crevel, Aubrey Beardsley, Alfred Kubin always appeared...
What’s left of those walks into madness, freedom or love? This whole culture of restlessness and rupture is dissolved among the smoke itself and the fading fog. With them, certain libertines and some libertarians were gone. From Sade to Genet. From Rimbaud to Burroughs.
The glasses of absenthe are rinsed to give way to our clean, cheap and banal time. Nobody now remembers the “Pauvre Lelian”. Nobody now wants to read Stefan Zweig and his “Welt von Gestern”. Because, by that way we would remember our terrible History.
From those ashes, from this “Rauchfuge”, memories in black and sepia emerge. Worn-out notebooks appears in my memory. I rediscover beautiful, tragic, ironic and erotic passages in our myths, legends, fantasies, realities and scraps.
They are all among the mist and smoke from the railways in the dusk of our culture.
Finishing off a cigarette while the misunderstood and hidden monsters howl in the last forests of Europe.
Guillermo Martín Bermejo
Berlin 2010